1950s Part 5: Land reform

 Land reform, more like robbing Peter to pay Paul
Paul now owned a brick house with stone pillars and a water buffalo
and Peter, worthless stocks of unprofitable nationalized corporations

Source: http://taipics.com/mediapubs_development.php

In 1953, 耕者有其田條例 was enacted. Many, to this day, still believe that this was a governmental benevolent policy (德政). Indeed, 300,000 tenant-farmer families had reaped the benefits; even though it came at a hefty price to others that had been haplessly classified as landlords.

Taiwan land reform working manual, Feb 1953

The definition of Landlord in China had evolved with time:
(1) In 1928, a small landlord was one who owned around 3.07 hectares of land. By this standard, only 6.77% of Taiwan's peasant households in the early 1950s qualified.
(2) In 1933, the threshold was changed to 5.12 hectares. And 2.88% of Taiwan's landowners would have qualified.
(3) In 1941, the definition again changed to an ownership of 18.41 hectares, only 0.9% of Taiwan's farming households would have qualified.
In other words, unlike China, there were very few mega-landlords in Taiwan.

Land reform was a policy of the utmost import in China. Whoever won the hearts and minds of the peasants would rule China. The slogan 耕者有其田 (land solely for tillers) was actually shared by both CCP and KMT. This photo was taken in the "liberated areas" in China in 1947:

土地法大纲公布后，解放区农民行动起来，为实现“耕者有其田”而斗争

The CCP mode was a bloody one, with the "evil" mega-landlords totally eliminated in the 50s. When the KMT carried out the land reform in Taiwan, a landlord is now defined as anyone who rented out land regardless of the acreage. With this, 106,049 households with more than 2 million people were affected, and many became destitute from the loss of their major even the only income.

Was there such a need for land reform as that in Communist China? Political, sociological, and economical analyses and debates abound these days. The simple fact remains that there was not much of a difference in wealth between the land owners and the hired farmers by the 1950s. Starting in the 1920s, through education, many owners had become white collar workers and moved away. And for a multitude of reasons, there were also households with no menfolks to work the fields. These owners leased out often their inherited family plots to those farming neighbors. Changes in the employment structure in 1946 and the monetary system in 1949 had ensured financial ruin of Taiwanese "landlords". Worse, under the robbing Peter to pay Paul land grab, Peter was compensated with stocks worth 1/10 of their face values, issued by nationalized corporations that never turned a profit. At least only livelihood, not lives, was lost.

This land reform was in fact the biggest property transfer in modern Taiwan history. Also neglected was what would happen to the land if the tenant-farmer-turned-land-owners decided to get out of farming. In the past 60 years, they had been selling off the land for industrial or residential development, first a trickle, increasingly, to a torrent in recent years, and a crop of nouveau riche is born.

[For more, see Taipei Times 2/1/2007]