Amendments to the Draft of Liu Shaoqi’s “Report on the Land Reform Issue” (June 1950) 1. With the exception of a very small number of landlords who have committed grave crimes—namely, the most heinous tyrannical gentry and those criminal elements who resolutely oppose the land reform, who should be sentenced to death or imprisonment by the courts—the general policy toward ordinary landlords is simply to abolish their feudal land ownership and to dissolve this social class, rather than to exterminate them physically.

2. During the period from July 1946 to October 1947, in many areas of North China, Shandong, and Northeast China, the peasant masses and our rural cadres, in carrying out the land reform, failed to follow the Central Committee’s directive issued on May 4, 1946, which stipulated that the land and property of rich peasants were, in principle, to remain untouched. Instead, acting according to their own inclinations, they confiscated the land and property of rich peasants just as they did those of landlords. This is understandable, for that period was the most intense and brutal phase of the struggle between the Chinese people and the reactionary Kuomintang forces. It was also during this time that the greatest number of deviations occurred in the land reform, resulting in infringements upon the interests of some middle peasants, damage to commerce and industry in certain rural areas, and, in some localities, indiscriminate beatings and killings. The primary causes of these phenomena were the extremely tense political and military situation at the time; moreover, most of our rural cadres lacked experience in land reform and did not know how to correctly classify rural class components. As a result, they misclassified the social status of some individuals, designating certain rich peasants as landlords and some middle peasants as rich peasants. In light of this situation, the Central Committee issued the Outline of the Land Law on October 10, 1947, clearly distinguishing between rich peasants and landlords while still permitting the expropriation of surplus land and property from rich peasants. That same winter, the Central Committee promulgated documents on the classification of rural class components, Chairman Mao published the Communiqué “On the Current Situation and Our Tasks”[1], and Comrade Ren Bishi delivered a speech on the issue of land reform. From that point onward, the chaos that had prevailed in the countryside came to an end, and the land reform entered a regular track. In order to prevent our comrades from repeating past mistakes when conducting land reform work in newly liberated areas, it is necessary to draw upon past experiences. We now find ourselves in an entirely new context, and the land reform legislation we are proposing—adopting the principle of abolishing the feudal system while preserving the rich-peasant economy—is likewise entirely appropriate.

3. The leadership of farmers’ associations at all levels must be clean and incorruptible; where this is not the case, the masses should be mobilized to carry out re-elections. By “clean,” we do not mean adopting a closed-door policy toward hired laborers, poor peasants, or middle peasants who may have made certain errors and refusing them membership. On the contrary, they should be welcomed into the association, educated, and united. What we mean by “clean” is to prevent landlords, rich peasants, and their agents from joining the farmers’ associations, and even more so from holding leadership positions within them.

Printed in Volume II of the Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi (with a manuscript copy annotated by Mao Zedong). Notes [1] Refers to the article “The Current Situation and Our Tasks,” found in Volume IV of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.