China's 1949-52 land reforms: The liberation of the working class or the preservation of the bourgeois society?

“Eating from a big [common] pot breeds laziness”

These were the words of Deng Xiaoping when declaring the need to dismantle the communes and intend to redistribute land and capital amongst the peasants and increase their power within society. While these principles (ignoring the anti-state and pro-capitalist ideas clearly present in the quote above) might appear to evoke an anti-feudal sentiment and aims to dismantle the bourgeoisie with the proletariat needs central to the running of society, it appears that this was the main means of paving the way for a capitalist society to remain in China and further promote the feudal system which ironically, would be run be the proletarians and serfs originally exploited by this and intending to dismantle it. While arguing that it was liberating the working classes, it was further keeping those below them within the constraints of the society repressing them. This presents the crossing of paths of capitalism and communism and the events in the lead up to Deng's various capitalist projects, as well as the disastrous impacts on the productivity, efficiency and cost of running farms (with over 60% of farms paying between 40% and 6o% of their gross produce as rent), The supposedly socialist principle of collectivized agriculture perhaps meaning that there would be arguably greater room to exploit the peasant farmers and their resources due to the loss of their own smallholdings as well as allowing greater feudal influence by those owning the large scale collective farms to be evident. This was in a time when the agriculture still remained China's dominant economic sector and prior to the major economic growth and modernisation the country had experienced assisted by its take-off by rapid industrialisation. This had, therefore proven for a supposedly working class led project free from state influence to ironically have further preserved traditional class hierarchy and more conservative models of society and been instrumental in forming the foundations of a capitalist society ever favoured in China and throughout the rest of the world.

Gray, J. (1964) Soviet Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (Oct., 1964), pp. 209-231

Hsu, D.Y, and Ching,, P.Y. (2024) Rethinking Socialism, Foreign Languages Press, ISBN: 978 1 03532 637 2