Land, as the most fundamental issue of people's livelihood, plays a very important role in every dynasty and every generation. The mainland is a typical agricultural country, from ancient times to the present there are examples of reform around the land, such as the Well Field System in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the Equalized Field System in the Northern Wei and Tang Dynasties, a Whip Law of the Ming Dynasty, the Stalls into Mu in the Qing Dynasty, etc. Each system is closely related to the lives of the people, and whether there is land and whether they can eat enough has also become one of the important factors for the people to choose whether to support the regime.
Since its founding, the Communist Party of China has attached great importance to solving the peasants' land problem, as early as the 1920s, it carried out a small-scale land reform in the Soviet union, and before liberation, land reform was carried out in North China and Northeast China, so that many peasants had completely their own land for the first time in their lives.
Publicize the land reform policy to the fellow villagers
In this land reform before and after liberation, the special form of "fighting landlords" stepped onto the stage of history. Through the "fighting landlords," the poor and lower middle peasants not only gained land, but also subverted the social status of the poor and lower middle peasants and landlords, and completely turned the poor and lower middle peasants upside down. As the most important form of land reform, "fighting landlords" has a relatively fixed process, including determining the target of struggle, visiting hardships, inducing suffering, complaining, and liquidating.
Since we want to "fight" the landlord, of course, we first need to confirm who the landlord is, that is, to determine the main body of the "fight", so the "division of components" has become the core of this link. The basic basis for the division is whether or not the land is occupied, whether it is exploited, whether it participates in labor, and then according to these bases, each person or family is divided into "peasants" or "landlords", and "peasants" are subdivided into four levels: "rich peasants", "middle peasants", "poor peasants" and "peasants".
Divide the ingredient list
In the specific implementation, due to the lag of relevant regulations and the specific conditions of each place, the standards for dividing components are not the same in different places. For example, in some villages, although the economic situation of each family is different, many landlords and peasants are related to each other, and the relationship between them is relatively good on weekdays, so when the "land reform working group" conducts investigations and visits and asks who is the landlord who exploits others for many years, people are often reluctant to tell the truth.
Some people from poor families said that they had no ability, and their families had no money, let alone buy land, and even did not have the money to rent land, so in order to make a living, they could only give long-term work to the landlord's family. Many landlords did not have so much land at the beginning, they all went out to do business to earn money, and then went home to buy land, and finally bought more land than their own people could not come, they could only hire people to breed, and people's land was also boiled out little by little.
Therefore, in this case, it is very difficult for a simple villager to "report" whose land and property are obtained by exploitation.
Later, someone came up with a good idea, that is, let the whole village sit around, and the heads of households publicly reported their sources of income and economic situation, and if there was concealment or omission, someone would point it out on the spot. Finally, according to the "wealth list" of all people, the components are divided. At this time, everyone wanted to be classified as poor and lower-middle peasants, because in this way they would not only not become the object of "struggle", but also be given a part of the land or other property of the landlords.
After the object of the "struggle" has been determined, it is basically impossible for all the peasants with relatively conservative ideas to take the initiative to fight against it, so it is necessary for the working group to guide and mobilize them to realize how they are exploited.
Visit the bitter
At the beginning of this link, people still do not take the initiative to cooperate, first of all, many people think that they do long work, people give money, work by themselves, it is natural, and the treatment of all long workers is the same, as if there is no "exploitation". Secondly, they believe that they are acquaintances who look up and do not look down, and it is always bad to say "bad things" about others behind their backs.
At this time, the members of the working group will guide them step by step, such as asking them "why the landlords can still eat and clothe every day without doing anything, you work every day, and your family can't even afford to eat one or two meats all year round", "Why do you work and farm the land, and pay more rent than you left behind", so that they can realize ideologically that they are indeed being exploited for many years, and then encourage them to communicate with other poor and lower-middle peasants, let everyone tell their tragic experiences, and mobilize everyone's emotions. Finally, let everyone dare to fight with the landlords.
Exchange tragic experiences with each other
Many elderly people, children and widows have been guided to spit out bitter water that they have not dared to vomit for many years with tears, and they no longer believe that they were born poor.
When people have gathered enough resentment against the landlords, they need to be thoroughly vented, and in front of the landlords and everyone, they tearfully tell how the landlords exploit themselves, which is the "complaint" link, and it is also the most emotional and exciting link in the whole process of "fighting the landlords". Through this link, the image of the landlords in the eyes of the people will be completely broken, and eventually they will admit their exploitative behavior, bow their heads to the public, admit their mistakes, apologize, and if the behavior is particularly bad, after a public trial in the court, they may be shot on the spot.
A landlord bully who is about to be executed
The number of grievance gatherings can be large or small, and when there is less than one room, all of them can sit down, and such small-scale grievance gatherings will often be held very frequently, driven by activists, and strive to let everyone participate. For example, in a township in eastern Hunan at that time, when the struggle against the big landlord bully Li Fengchan was present, a total of more than 5,000 people, and more than 40 people came to the stage to complain.
Medium-sized grievance conference
Of course, such a large-scale grievance conference is rare, in some places the grievance conference is in the form, everyone symbolically surrounds the person who is designated as a landlord component, everyone shouts "XXX is a big landlord, hit XXX", sometimes in order to save trouble, this sentence is directly said by the landlord himself, the whole process is completely unserious, and even ridicule and laughter.
The complainers are very emotional
There are also very fierce scenes, some people because they are afraid that the landlord will remember revenge, they have the psychology of "fighting to the death", they think that anyway, they have torn their faces, they can not care about the face, in the final analysis, they face the landlord or the kind of fear psychology that has been formed for a long time. Guo Degang's famous saying, "Fear to the extreme is anger", explains this situation very well.
After the landlord confessed his "crime", he began to "liquidate".
Through the accounting of the working group and the village cadres, the land of each landlord is verified, and all debts are cleared, the landlord's land is confiscated, the land of the kulaks is expropriated, and then the land is distributed according to the situation of each peasant household.
Property confiscated from the landlord
After dividing up the land, it is also necessary to dig up "floating wealth", the so-called "floating wealth", that is, the landlord's gold and silver, grain and clothing, furniture and livestock, production of agricultural tools, and so on. In order to avoid confiscation, many landlords will treasure a part of their gold and silver treasures in a hidden place at night, such as burying them in the ground and stuffing them in the cracks in the walls, but in the end they will basically be "dug up" by the task force or activists, and then uniformly distributed to all the poor and lower-middle peasants, because through the "complaint" link, they have fully realized how miserable they were oppressed and exploited in the past, so when they are allocated land or other property, they basically do not feel guilty.
Find the hidden gold and silver fine soft
After the liquidation is completed, the social status of the landlords has been completely subverted, in the past they were the representatives of the "identity" in the village, some people even took pride in having a good relationship with a certain landlord, and they felt particularly faceless, but after the "struggle", the landlords, land and property were all swept away, not only was it not easy to find a way to support themselves for a while, it was difficult to maintain their livelihood, and the image in the eyes of other villagers also fell to the bottom, they were no longer held high, but began to be isolated, disliked, and even discriminated against.
When I got the land certificate, the whole family was very happy
The most intuitive result of the land reform "fighting landlords" is that the peasants have been allocated their own land, and those who were too poor to speak loudly before can stand up straight and confidently face everything, and people have begun to thank the new policies, and they are also full of expectations for life, so that the whole society has vitality, which is undoubtedly the largest and most thorough reform in China for thousands of years. In the autumn of 1952, the national land reform was basically completed, and more than 300 million peasants who had no land or little land for generations were allocated more than 700 million mu of land, laying a solid foundation for the realization of "equality for all".
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