Inequality, land reform and agricultural growth in China, 1952–55: A preliminary treatment

Abstract

Although the Agrarian Reform Laws of the late 1940s were intended to preserve the rich peasant economy, Chinese land reform during 1947–52 was uneven in its spatial impact. In some areas, the reform was indeed a ‘wager on the strong’. But in others, land reform was more egalitarian, re‐distributing self‐cultivated land from rich peasants to the rural poor. New county‐level evidence suggests that this egalitarianism hampered the pace of agricultural growth in the years immediately prior to collectivisation.