Uses of the concept of “class” in the Chinese communist revolution: a study of the land reform undertaken in the Chinese Soviet area led by Mao Zedong

Abstract

ABSTRACT The period between 1927 and 1934 witnessed a waxing and waning of the Chinese Soviet revolution; one aspect of it was the social engineering campaigns, such as the Land Reform carried out in the Chinese Soviet Area. In it, the concept of class, originally an imported ideological and theoretical concept from pure Marxism, was applied to China’s local society. Correspondingly, the Chinese Soviet regime changed its approach to the Land Revolution (tudi geming), i.e. from “targeting local landlords and appropriating their wealth” to a set of procedures and routines centered on “holding mass meetings and designating class labels.” Established literature on the Land Revolution generally treats “class” as a certain criterion or a kind of objective social reality, based on which researchers tend to judge certain land reform policies as having been on a spectrum from “too radical” to “too conservative.” However, they largely ignore the details of the process through which a “class” concept was grafted onto China’s local society – both rural and urban. By taking stock of and analyzing historical records regarding the land revolution and class categorization in the Central Soviet Area, this article examines how “the class” evolved from such a purely theoretical concept to specific policies. By so doing, it drives home the importance of structural factors that are critical to our understanding of the internal logic of the Chinese Communist revolution.