Building Maoist China: Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, and Famine

The new government's 1950 Land Reform Law redistributed land confiscated from landlords to landless peasants, a process accompanied by 'class struggle' campaigns of public trials and executions in which historians estimate hundreds of thousands, and possibly more than a million, landlords died. From 1953 the state pushed agricultural cooperatives through progressively more collectivized stages, a process that accelerated sharply around 1955-1956 along Soviet lines, while a system of compulsory state grain procurement extracted agricultural surpluses to help finance industrialization. In 1958 the government also introduced the household registration system (hukou), which tightly restricted movement between the countryside and the cities.