Coercive State Building and 1950s Rural Reform in the People's Republic of China

Kevin Luo, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Chinese Communist historiography conventionally portrays the National Land Reform Campaign (1950-53) as a highly successful state building project in eradicating the power of the landlord class in China. What were the campaign’s effects in transforming the composition of local rural society and its power relations in reality? Using a mixture of archival evidence and a systematic examination of state-reported data on land reform, in this paper I show how local kinship networks, i.e. clans, were able to routinely retain power throughout the Campaign and resisted direct intervention by a nascent and relatively weak state apparatus. However, the scarcity of state authority at the grassroots level did not preclude an absence of state power. Rather, I argue the state played an influential role in shaping class grievances throughout subsequent political campaigns of the Mao era, and at the same time was paralyzed by issues of local ‘bureaucratism’ and civil conflict. I suggest that this state building paradox – of political cellularization of rural society and top-down efforts at party-state penetration – can be traced back to the critical juncture of the Land Reform Campaign in the 1950s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 79. Historical Social Sciences and China (II): Socialism, Capitalism, and Transitions in Between