How and Why Did the System of Land Ownership Change During 1949-57? (2a.2) Flashcards
1
Q
What was the Agrarian Reform Law 1950?
A
- Portrayed landlords as ‘ruling class’
- Now a debate on whether there was really a distinct landlord class
- Mao needed to rally peasants to his side to justify his claim to have successfully adapted Marxism to fit Chinese circumstances
- Made clear that land reform mean redistribution, not lower rents/taxes
2
Q
What happened to landlords?
A
- Work teams calculated how much land people owned
- Organised meeting to device how each villager should be labelled: ‘landlord’, ‘rich peasant’, ‘middle peasant’, ‘poor peasant’ or ‘labourer’
- Publicly humiliated, accused of exploitation
- If found guilty, possessions confiscated and divided up among villagers
- Victims beaten up and executed, often by villagers themselves
3
Q
How many landlords had lost their land by the end of 1951?
A
10 million
4
Q
What % of land changed hands by the end of 1951?
A
40%
5
Q
How many deaths were there?
A
700,000-3 million
6
Q
How was anti-landlord paranoia whipped up?
A
- Work teams dug up old grievances against better off individuals
- Offered prospect of a share in the confiscated spoils of those found guilty of being landlords
7
Q
What were MATs?
A
- Mutual aid teams
- From 1951, groups of 10 families encouraged to form MATs where they pooled labour, animals and equipment
- Still had rights of private ownership
- Managed by peasant associations
8
Q
What were APCs?
A
- Agricultural producers’ cooperatives
- 1952, successful MATs encouraged to combine to form APCs of 40-50 families
- Land pooled and consolidated into larger units
- Cultivated more efficiently than traditional strips
- Families with larger holdings still allowed to keep some land for personal use
- Profits shared out at end of year
9
Q
What % of rural households were in APCs by 1955?
A
14%
10
Q
What happened to badly planned APCs?
A
- In their desire to respond to Mao’s call of faster change, local officials rushed into creating APCs before they were properly planned
- These APCs went into debt as had to borrow money to buy equipment
- Prompted Mao to call for a slowdown spring 1953
11
Q
What happened when the peasants started buying/selling land and food again?
A
- Rejection of revolutionary values infuriated Mao
- Renewed pressure on peasants to join APCs
- Better off peasants often slaughtered and ate their animals rather than handing them over
- 1954 harvest was poor, caused gov to requisition grain to feed cities
- Caused so much rural protest that Jan 1955 Mao did another u-turn and announced policy of ‘Stop, Contract and Develop’
- Halt to APC development for next 18 months
12
Q
What was the change in APC households from July 1955 - Jan 1956?
A
17 million - 75 million
13
Q
When did Mao make his mind up to go for all-out collectivisation?
A
- July 1955
- Conference of Local Party Secretaries
14
Q
What was the ‘Socialist Upsurge in the Countryside’?
A
- Selectively edited compilation of favourable reports on collectives
- Written by local activists
15
Q
What was Mao’s real reason for the drive to collectivisation?
A
- Mao’s fear that that supplies to the cities would continue to be unreliable as long as peasants still owned the land
- Saw the peasants as to instinctively reactionary they would need to be forced into collectives otherwise they would revert to capitalism
- ‘The peasants want freedom, but we want socialism’
