The Making of "Evil Tyrant Landlords": A Microhistory of Moralized Class Division during Land Reform in Beijing's Suburbs, 1949

Abstract:Class division represented arguably the most crucial stage of the land reform campaigns mounted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it not only divided the land but also the political power of rural Chinese society. Based on newly available local archives, this case study of class division during land reform in the suburbs of Beijing argues that the making of "evil tyrant landlords"—and the struggle against them—played a decisive role in conceptualizing the "landlord" as both a figure of Marxist economic exploitation and the morally stigmatized rural elite during land reform and the building of the party-state. After the collapse of the existing rural ruling class, the "struggle against tyrants" movement immediately turned toward enacting formal class division. As a consequence, the discourse of class struggle based on a clear-cut landlord-peasantry dichotomy was, unsurprisingly, allowed by the CCP to infiltrate rural China's post-1949 political culture.