Date 1948–50 Location China | Deaths 4,500,000 | |
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Perpetrators Radicalized Chinese Peasants | ||
Part of Mao Zedong's land reform of the early People's Republic of China was a campaign of classicide (class extermination) that targeted landlords in order to redistribute land to the peasant class. It resulted in millions of deaths. Those killed were targeted on the basis of class rather than ethnicity, so terming the campaign genocide is, sensu stricto, incorrect. The neologism classicide is more accurate.
Contents
Background
In 1946, three years before the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), The Communist Party of China launched a thorough land reform, which won the party millions of supporters among the poor and middle peasantry. The land and other property of landlords were expropriated and redistributed so that each household in a rural village would have a comparable holding. This agrarian revolution was made famous in the West by William Hinton's book Fanshen.
Killings
Ren Bishi, a member of the party's Central Committee, likewise stated in a 1948 speech that "30,000,000 landlords and rich peasants would have to be destroyed." Shortly after the founding of the PRC, land reform, according to Mao biographer Philip Short, "lurched violently to the left" with Mao laying down new guidelines for "not correcting excesses prematurely."
Mao in this vein insisted that the people themselves, not the security organs, should become involved in the killing of landlords who had oppressed them. This was quite different from Soviet practice, in which the NKVD would arrest counterrevolutionaries and then have them secretly executed and often buried before sunrise. Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords with their bare hands would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be.
Deaths
Actual numbers killed in land reform are believed to have been lower than Ren Bishi's estimate, but did rank in the millions, as there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution". R. J. Rummel, an analyst of government killings, or "democide", gives a "reasonably conservative figure" of about 4,500,000 landlords and better-off peasants killed. Philip Short estimates that at least one to three million landlords and members of their families were killed, either beaten to death on the spot by enraged peasants at mass meetings organized by local communist party work teams or reserved for public execution later on. Estimates abroad ranged as high as 28,000,000 deaths. In 1976 the U.S. State Department estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform; Mao estimated that only 800,000 landlords were killed.