Comments on Li Jingquan’s Report on
Leadership by Poor and Middle Peasants in
the Old Liberated Regions
(February 19, 1948)
After reading your report, I have the following comments on the questions you
raised:
	 1.	 In the old liberated regions where land has been equally distributed, the feudal economic basis of the landlords and rich peasants has been eliminated,
but never completely. In places where considerable adjustments are still
needed, do not redistribute land again; instead, we should adopt a reasonable method of cutting the excess to fill the gaps as a means of satisfying
the demands of peasants who do not have enough land. Carrying out another
equal distribution of land in these regions would be wrong. The policy you
are currently adopting is correct. In these regions, we should only organize
poor peasant groups within the peasant associations to protect the interests
of the poor peasants and farmhands. A very good and suitable method is to
have poor peasants, farmhands, and new middle peasants hold two-thirds
of the positions in the peasant associations, local congresses, and governments to ensure their leadership, while one-third of the positions can be held
by the old middle peasants. Organizing poor peasant leagues and insisting
that they lead everything in regions where poor peasants and farmhands are
in the minority and both new and old middle peasants are in the majority
is an adventurist commandism that violates the line of the National Land
Conference. If the work teams or groups in your region are still doing this,
they should be stopped at once and they should be called back for training
and then returned to start from scratch according to the specific situation.
	 2.	 Apart from the newly liberated regions and the old liberated regions, there
are some regions that fall in between. In these semi-old liberated regions,
the land problem is not as thoroughly resolved as it is in the old liberated
regions, yet it is a little better or much better than it is in the newly liberated
regions where the land problem has not been resolved at all or very little. The
working guidelines in these semi-old liberated regions should be different
from those in the old liberated regions as well as different from those in the
newly liberated regions. I hope you will study this matter and then write to
tell me the results.
--- Notes

Our source for this text is Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tudi gaige wenjian xuanbian (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981), p. 242.
DOI:  10.4324/9781315719436-90