Land and the Peasantry

This theme gathers three documents spanning 17 December 1928 to 24 April 1945. Their genres differ and so do their ways of handling land. The December 1928 'Land Law of the Jinggang Mountains' is a statute, setting out confiscation and distribution article by article. The December 1935 'Declaration of the Central Soviet Government to the People of Inner Mongolia' is an external declaration, telling the Mongolian people the Soviet government's attitude to land, pastures and salt ponds. The April 1945 'On Coalition Government' is a congress report whose sixth item, 'The Land Question', places land reform among the concrete programme of the time.

The 'Land Law of the Jinggang Mountains' has nine articles. The first confiscates all land for the Soviet government and distributes it by three methods — to peasants for individual cultivation, to peasants for collective cultivation, and organised by the Soviet government as model farms, with the first as the main method. The second forbids buying and selling once all land is confiscated and distributed by the Soviet government. The fourth sets two standards for the quantity distributed: one by population, sharing equally among old and young, male and female; one by labour power, giving those who can labour twice what those who cannot receive. It gives three reasons for adopting the first standard, including that before the facilities for supporting the aged and rearing the young are complete, the old and young, if given too little land, cannot subsist.

This land law also treats mountain forests, the land tax and handicraft workers. Mountain forests are divided into tea hills, fuel hills and bamboo-wood hills; the first two are distributed for average use by township, the bamboo-wood hills belong to the Soviet government and peasants may enjoy the bamboo and wood with its permission. The land tax is set at 15%, 10% or 5% according to production; in natural disaster or other special circumstance one may petition the higher Soviet government for exemption. Landless village handicraft workers who voluntarily take fields receive half the amount a peasant receives; Red Army and local-militia officers and men, and those serving in the government and other public bodies, are all allotted land, farmed for them by Soviet-hired substitutes.

The December 1935 'Declaration of the Central Soviet Government to the People of Inner Mongolia', signed by Mao Zedong as chairman of the Central Soviet Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic, first states the situation of the Inner Mongolian nation, saying Japanese imperialism must occupy all China and therefore first Manchuria and Mongolia, and that the Chinese warlords led by Chiang Kai-shek have made the whole region of Inner Mongolia into provinces and repeatedly sent petty warlords to seize the Mongolian people's pastures and salt ponds. The declaration then lists five points; the first holds that the original six leagues, twenty-four banners, forty-nine banners of Inner Mongolia, the two banners of Chahar Tumet and the three special banners of Ningxia — whether already turned into counties or still grassland — shall all be returned to the Inner Mongolian people as their territory.

The declaration's fourth point is more concrete: first return the pastures and two salt ponds seized by Jing Yuexiu, and the region seized by Gao Shixiu, to the Inner Mongolian people, and make the places near the Long Wall — Ningtiaoliang, Anbian, Dingbian — into commercial zones to develop trade between the two sides. The fifth point says the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army guerrillas or other armed forces have absolutely no intention of advancing across the grassland, and expresses willingness to conclude a mutual-defence alliance. Compared with the 1928 land law, the land spoken of here is no longer fields distributed to peasants for cultivation, but the ownership of pastures, salt ponds and territory.

The April 1945 'On Coalition Government', in the sixth item of its concrete programme, takes up the land question. It says that, to destroy Japanese invaders and build a new China, land reform must be carried out and the peasants liberated, and cites Dr Sun Yat-sen's slogan 'land to the tiller' as the correct slogan of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary stage of the time. It then explains that 'land to the tiller' transfers land from feudal exploiters to the peasants, making it the peasants' private property, freeing the peasants from the feudal land relation and raising agriculture from its old backward level to a modern one.

The same report also writes of the war-time practice: during the resistance, all is subordinated to resistance, and rent reduction and interest reduction and all democratic reforms are for resistance, not isolated from it; to unite all social strata against the common enemy, the landlords' land ownership is not abolished and rent and interest are paid appropriately. It also says that once the land system is reformed, even if only initially — as after rent reduction — the peasants' production interest increases, and then, helping the peasants to organise voluntarily into agricultural producers' cooperatives, productivity develops.

Read together, the three pieces show a shift in wording: the 1928 law writes of confiscation and distribution; the 1935 declaration writes of the return of pastures and territory; the 1945 report writes of reform alongside rent reduction. The same word 'land' refers to different objects and is handled differently in the three documents; their objects expand from the base-area peasants, to the Inner Mongolian people, to the whole nation the report addresses.

Editor's note: this page is read across by theme; all excerpts are taken verbatim from the base text, punctuation included. Each piece's date follows the base text and common cataloguing. The several pieces' statements on land must be read back into their own year and object; this page only states what each piece writes, offers no evaluation, and draws no analogy to other periods.