Qin Hui on Land Reform

Qin Hui, “What was the True Purpose of CCP Land Reform?”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by Mark Czeller (DPhil Candidate, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford) 
 
Introduction 
 
Qin Hui 秦晖 (b. 1953) is a leading historian and public intellectual who taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement. Translations of his writings on a range of contemporary issues have appeared on Reading the China Dream; the piece translated here is a concise introduction to his views on a topic, land reform, that relates to the subject of much of his early research, the economics and politics of rural China, and is translated here as a complement to the translation of the much longer essay by the younger scholar Li Fangchun.
 
Qin began his career studying the history of peasant rebellions, finding that, contrary to orthodox CCP narratives, they were not generally the outcome of tenants rebelling against landlords, but of relatively well-to-do villagers, including small-scale landlords, rebelling against exploitation by the state.[2] In perhaps his best-known work on the socioeconomic history of rural China, he argued that landlordism was not significant in the rural economy of the Guanzhong plain in central Shaanxi.[3]
 
In the excerpt translated here, which is part of a lecture given at Peking University in 2012, Qin applies his scepticism about the importance of landlord-tenant relations to the outcome of the Chinese Civil War, taking aim at the traditional view that the CCP’s victory was closely tied to its determination to carry out much-needed land reform. The reason ordinary rural residents preferred the CCP to the KMT, he argues, was simply that the CCP was less corrupt. This, however, was not by itself enough to make possible the kind of mass mobilization required for war.

This is where violent land reform comes in: Qin argues that the reason CCP land reform during the Civil War became so violent was because it was a mechanism by which the Party could force people to truly commit to the cause. Having engaged in violence against fellow villagers, people had no choice but to remain committed to the Party. This, he suggests, is the only way to account for why there was so much violence involved in land reform in “old liberated areas”, where years of relatively non-violent socioeconomic reforms had already reduced inequality dramatically.
 
To capture the notion of commitment to the organization through participation in violence, Qin uses the term “tou ming zhuang 投名状,” which the Taiwanese Ministry of Education’s dictionary defines as follows: “when a bandit gang has a new member, they have to kill someone and hand the victim’s head to the leader so as to demonstrate loyalty.”[4] In his longer piece translated here, Li Fangchun refers to Qin’s reasoning in this talk, and his use of this metaphor, as an example of his claim that the “doubting antiquity movement”—of which Li considers Qin and many other scholars of his generation a part—"often falls into the trap of negating [revolutionary] antiquity, and cannot produce analyses or explanations of true intellectual depth.” Readers can make their own minds up about whether Li’s criticism is fair; in my view, this piece by Qin offers a more convincing illustration of Li’s thesis that scepticism about the CCP’s revolutionary project has sometimes led scholars to defend overly simplistic interpretations of history than does the work by Yang Kuisong that is Li’s central target. 
 
Translation
 
We say that the Chinese revolution was an “agrarian revolutionary war,” but was the land question the most essential element of the Chinese revolution? Was the difference between the CCP and the KMT that the former promoted land reform and the latter opposed it? Was KMT’s loss of public support and the CCP’s attainment of it due to the CCP’s having redistributed the land? What was the relation between the fact that the civil war ended with the CCP’s victory, and the fact that it carried out land reform?
 
The differences between the CCP’s and the KMT’s land policies were clearly enormous—the CCP’s were much more radical. But if we analyze the various [political] forces in China at the time with respect to the land question, the KMT was by no means the most conservative. Of course, the KMT opposed violent land reform, but its ideology included the objective of “equal land rights.” Many people have pointed out that due to vested interests among grassroots KMT members, the implementation of this ideology encountered much opposition, but it remains the case that this objective was part of the KMT’s ideology.

Those at the time who thought that not even peaceful land reform was called for were a third force, meaning political forces outside the KMT and the CCP, such as the Democratic Alliance. The Democratic Alliance primarily had two kinds of members: liberals and cultural traditionalists. Capitalist economics emphasizes the protection of property rights, and liberals of course opposed the idea of the state confiscating land; cultural traditionalists were even more opposed, as they thought that traditional rural China was beautiful and harmonious, governed well by morally upright elites according to Confucian ethics. Rural elites, in the CCP’s terms, were “local tyrants and evil gentry,” a term that was also used in KMT discourse. So on the land question, the CCP was the most radical, followed by the KMT, and then by these third parties.
 
Between 1943 and 1947, in order to resolve their disputes, the KMT and the CCP carried out very complicated negotiations, in which many problems were discussed, but two were central: “one was political power, the other was the military,” or in other words, the question was how many armies and how many positions [of political importance] the CCP could have. Both the KMT and the CCP affirmed that politics should be democratic and the army should be unified. The difference was that the CCP wanted democratic politics first and then a nationalized army, that is, it wanted the KMT to first relinquish its one-party dictatorship and only then to consider what would happen to the CCP’s armed forces; whereas the KMT’s view was the opposite, wanting the CCP to first give up its army and only then to have democratic elections. The two sides argued about this endlessly. They also argued about many other issues—they even spent a lot of time discussing how to manage the Yellow River. The documentary record of the negotiations that took place between the KMT and the CCP from 1943 to 1947 run to millions of characters, not a single one of which concerns the land question…
 
During the War of Resistance against Japan, the peasants did not like the KMT and were sympathetic to the CCP—this is clear. Prior to the war, this was far less clear, and helps to explain why the land revolution did not succeed. But during the War of Resistance, the conflict between the KMT and the peasantry did indeed become very bad, in large part because the KMT’s exactions increased drastically. During the war, the KMT’s fiscal situation changed enormously—before the war, they had relied primarily on the commercial cities on the eastern coast, and land taxes were the domain of local finances, which the central government did not rely on.

During the war, the KMT lost its original fiscal base, and so it transferred the entire burden onto the peasantry. In order to resolve its fiscal problems, the KMT introduced a policy of “land taxes belonging to the centre” right at the beginning of the war, and in order to increase the income from land taxes, it began expanding its rural organizations, enlisting many rural cadres. The grassroots cadres of the KMT were a particular type of person—they were like [the people involved in] the CCP’s peasant movements, they were “ruffian movements 痞子运动,” giving power in the countryside to very unscrupulous people. One can imagine the kinds of things they did in terms of extracting money and grain. People in the countryside who actually enjoyed respect did not want to get involved in this kind of thing, and so relations between the KMT’s grassroots cadres and peasants were indeed very bad.
 
People have analyzed the 3000 plus peasant disturbances of the Republican era, and found that the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with landlords and land rents—they were all connected to state behaviour, specifically corruption, extortion and the misuse of public funds by grassroots cadres, and this was the case until land reform. When our Party carried out “land reform” it called on the peasants to “speak bitterness”—if you look at the materials about the bitterness they spoke, you will discover that the that majority were not about Zhou Bapi having collected land rent, but almost all about the local authorities.[5]

In other words, it was all about political oppression, by which I mean extraction by the state. Bitterness spoken about economic exploitation by landlords was very rare. Here we have a question: war increases the burden on peasants, but the CCP also wanted to fight, and the resources for doing so also came from the peasants, so why did the peasants support the CCP but oppose the KMT? The initial positive impression of the CCP was because the CCP was less corrupt that the KMT, and the cost of its rule lower.
 
In terms of the whole country, the burden on peasants in CCP areas during the civil war was on average higher than in KMT areas, because the areas controlled by the CCP were smaller, and many of them were poor—the KMT controlled more areas, including richer areas like the Jiangnan region. However, the ability of the Chinese state to transfer fiscal resources  was very poor, it was very hard to use resources extracted from one area in another area, and the areas where the civil war was taking place—Shandong, Northern Jiangsu, Shaanxi, Shanxi—the KMT and the CCP had a roughly equal rural foundation, that is, they both requisitioned grain from the locals. Ordinary people still preferred the CCP, because the KMT was more corrupt, and so the cost of its rule was higher.
 
When it comes to seizing political power through military victory, how important is popular support 民心 alone? We have a phrase that goes “if you win the people’s hearts, the world is your prize得人 心者得天下”. That’s a great-sounding phrase, but under what circumstances is it really the case? Only in a democratic election—for example, if I think the CCP is better than the KMT, I will vote for them. But if the two parties are engaged in a military conflict, even if I prefer the CCP to the KMT, that does not necessarily imply I’m willing to die for them. The side that wins the battle is not so much the side that wins popular support, but the side that is better able to mobilize resources. In the final analysis, winning a war is about mobilization—it’s not about which side is viewed more favourably, but about which side has more people willing to die for it. The fact that I’m willing to vote for your party doesn’t necessarily mean I’m willing to die for your cause—this is a pretty straightforward. Ordinary people were sympathetic to the CCP and hated the KMT—this was true even without land reform, but it wasn’t enough to achieve a high level of mobilization. “Land reform” was needed to mobilize resources, and in this context, land reform was no longer about distributing land.
 
Statistics have shown that 70% of deaths during [Civil War-era] land reform occurred around 1947 in the old [liberated] areas 老区, and in old areas, land reform did not really have the function of equalizing land. For what was an old area? An old area was a location that the CCP had been in charge of for a long time during the War of Resistance against Japan. During the war, the CCP did not carry out land reform, but reduced rent and interest and equalized burdens. In sum, they basically expropriated landlords, only without violent class struggle. By 1946 and 1947, ownership of land was not highly concentrated in the old areas, there was no land left to distribute—and yet it was precisely in these areas the land reform involved killings in virtually every village.
 
A lot of sources say that land reform was the bloodiest in the Jin-Sui border region, and since Kang Sheng was in charge there, it is said that he was responsible for the leftism. Kang Sheng is currently viewed as a bad person, so it is easy to explain the nature of the land reform he directed. But we must note that the Jin-Sui border region was by no means the most leftist nor the most bloody. Land reform in the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu area also saw deaths in every village. To say that Kang Sheng was in charge in Jin-Sui and Chairman Mao didn’t know, this is totally unconvincing. The Jin-Sui border region was just across the river from Shaan-Gan-Ning, and the people in charge were both sent by Mao—one was his chief secretary, the other was his son Mao Anying.
 
In the mobilization for land reform, Renmin Ribao published the details of South Pingle village in the second district of Hui County. Land reform had been carried out a number of times already in this village, but it was said that it was still not enough, as a few landlord households hadn’t been struggled against. The most interesting was this claim: “for example, managerial landlord Zhang Ziru has three people in his family and farms land with an output of 21 dan, i.e. 7 dan per person, which is five percent higher than the village average.” This was claimed to be a very severe problem.[6] Managerial landlord Ding Guoping had 9 people in his family and 51.4 mu of land, which, based on the figure implied by the Zhang Ziru case, did not even reach the village average, but, the article wrote, “his family’s standard of living is not bad, as one of his sons is a primary school teacher and earns a salary every month—his daughter-in-law wears jewellery, and their clothes are spick-and-span.”[7]  

This was also seen to be a great problem. People were investigated and struggled against relentlessly, with the consequence that people inevitably died. In each village, there were statistics for the number of people beaten to death and the distribution of the “fruits of struggle.” These fruits included very little land. For example, in a village in Henan with over 2000 mu of land, only 161 mu emerged as the fruits of struggle, i.e. 7.2% of land was redistributed, but in this small village of 113 households, seven people were beaten to death by the masses. In Wu village there were over 6000 mu of land of which only about 500 mu were the fruits of struggle, and yet 20 people were beaten to death, including 14 landlords, five “spies”, and one “evil tyrant”, and in the course of the struggle, 18% of the population fled.
 
The phenomenon of people fleeing during land reform in the old areas was very severe; the CCP and the KMT both have statistics about this. In Taiwan I’ve seen the KMT’s statistics on this and they are similar, indicating a rate of about 20%. In the course of this land reform movement, 2% of people were struggled to death, and 20% were forced to flee—these people all fled to the KMT controlled areas, and what was the outcome of that going to be? These people constituted the so-called “landlord restitution corps” 还乡团 that we speak of so often.  The KMT called them refugees from bandit areas, and how to treat them was a difficult question. Some people in the KMT suggested that they be armed and supported in their efforts, so that they could become the mass base of the KMT and could also provide various kinds of intelligence. Afterwards they decided against this plan. The KMT thought that this would offend the remaining 80% of people, which would end badly. The subsequent events show that this was a mistake on the part of the KMT—not supporting these people meant that the KMT lacked a social base. But that would have meant opposing the majority, so the KMT decided not to help them return, leaving them instead to become destitute in the KMT areas, and in many cases becoming opponents of the KMT.
 
So why did the CCP have to resort to so much bloodshed? The peasants would perhaps not have been willing to die for a few mu of land—but if the victory of the CCP meant material benefits, while the defeat of the CCP put their lives in danger, then of course mobilization was easy. This is why land reform had to involve killing. How much killing was involved in land reform? In one village of 4075 people, 25 people were beaten to death, of whom only two were landlords and four were rich peasants—ten were called “evil tyrant middle peasants,” and nine “evil tyrant poor peasants.” In the whole village, 332 households and 1201 individuals became targets of struggle, and activists were mobilized against them. In the struggle, Party records identified 862 activists, among whom 271 were true activists.

After five people were beaten to death, those who were not yet true activists had effectively made a pledge 交了投名状 to become true activists themselves. To make someone willing to sacrifice himself, a key condition is to ensure he has no way back – once the semi-activists became committed有了投名状, the problem was solved. In April 1947, when Liu Shaoqi went to the Central Committee’s Jin-Cha-Ji sub-bureau, he said: “Taking up cases again is the key, we must do a thorough job of mobilizing the party and the administration, the army and the people. Doing a thorough job means some people will die, but it also means that the peasants will be willing to accept a heavier burden, and it will be easier to recruit people to join the army.” The point of reinvestigating again and again was not to find a bit more land, but to shed more blood, and to create an atmosphere of life-or-death struggle—this was the only way to achieve a high degree of mobilization.
 
Whose land was redistributed during land reform? Part of it belonged to landlords, and another part belonged to clans and temples. This communally owned land, which was the symbol of traditional rural identity, was entirely destroyed, leading to complete private ownership of land. Rural China after land reform was thus characterized by a one hundred percent small-peasant private ownership system.
 
In 1929, when the Bolsheviks tried to form collectives on the foundation of the traditional mir, they encountered a lot of resistance, and needed to employ large-scale violence. The peasants could only be forced into the collectives at a great cost. And yet in China, where landholding was characterized by small private holdings and without any collectivism, agriculture was easily collectivized.  During Soviet collectivization in 1929, there were numerous peasant uprisings; in the lower-Volga region alone, there were some 700,000 people involved in uprisings. The state mobilized the army, the air force, and tanks, and there were even mutinies in the Red Army. So why was collectivization so much smoother in China? Because the struggle to the death during land reform not only provided a mechanism for intense mobilization and the centralization of organizational resources, it also destroyed traditional forms of rural identity. As a result, rural society completely lost its ability to autonomously govern itself, with the result that when tens of millions of people starved in 1960, things still remained basically stable.   
 
Notes

[1]This translation is excerpted from 秦晖, "暴力土改的实质是逼农民纳'投名状'" [The Essence of Violent Land Reform was to Force Peasants to Demonstrate their Loyalty to the Revolution], a lecture given at Peking University in March 2012.  Thanks to David Ownby for comments on the translation and the introduction.

[2] Translator’s note:  For information on Qin’s life and research, see this revealing interview in the New Left Review.

[3] Qin Hui 秦晖 and Su Wen 苏文, Tianyuanshi yu kuangxiangqu: Guanzhong moshi yu qianjindai shehui de zai renshi 田园诗与狂想曲：关中模式与前近代社会的再认识 [Pastorals and rhapsodies: the Guanzhong model and a new understanding of premodern societies] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 1996).

[4] https://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=50556&la=0&powerMode=0

[5] Translator’s note: Zhou Bapi 周扒皮 was one of the standard “evil landlords” of Mao-era propaganda, made famous by the 1964 animated short film “The Cock Crows in the Middle of the Night 半夜鸡叫”. The story was that Zhou Bapi learned to imitate the sound of a cock crowing so that he could force his hired hands to wake up earlier and work longer hours.  

[6] Translator’s note: dan 石is a unit of measurement for grain. 

[7] Translator’s note: a mu 亩 is a unit of area equal to a sixth of an acre.