This thesis describes the patterns and practices of Communist land reform as it was carried out in Shuangcheng County, outside of Harbin, between 1946 and 1948. I draw on systematic archival data recording almost all events – expropriation, redistribution, violence, execution, and escape – related to land reform in this county’s 500 villages and 80,000 households during these two years. Dozens of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) village work reports, thousands of individual-level records of property expropriation and violence, and tens of thousands of household-level records of property allocation make it possible to describe in detail the CCP’s administrative organization, patterns of land reform implementation, and practices of property redistribution and violence over the full 2...[ Read more ]

This thesis describes the patterns and practices of Communist land reform as it was carried out in Shuangcheng County, outside of Harbin, between 1946 and 1948. I draw on systematic archival data recording almost all events – expropriation, redistribution, violence, execution, and escape – related to land reform in this county’s 500 villages and 80,000 households during these two years. Dozens of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) village work reports, thousands of individual-level records of property expropriation and violence, and tens of thousands of household-level records of property allocation make it possible to describe in detail the CCP’s administrative organization, patterns of land reform implementation, and practices of property redistribution and violence over the full 24 months of land reform in Shuangcheng.

Although land reform is a foundational narrative of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and represents one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in human history, our understanding of Chinese land reform has hitherto been limited to isolated village narratives. While we know intuitively that land reform was an extremely complex process spread across time and space, this thesis is the first attempt to systematically measure this complexity for a region as large as a single county. I show that these processes were fundamentally different from those described in property-based narratives of communist revolution, including the CCP’s own Marxist interpretations. While previous narratives of land reform emphasize class exploitation based on property ownership, in Shuangcheng land reform was as much about regime change as economic exploitation. Archival land reform records were more likely to identify the targets of land reform as illegitimate power holders – Han traitors, evil gentry, and local bullies – rather than property holders like landlords and rich peasants. By empirically exploring these processes from the ground up, this thesis aspires to be the first step towards a new understanding of modern China originating from a data-driven, archival-based scholarship of discovery.