From the Economist (link):
IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would, he said, “take certain necessary steps” to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” If only things had turned out this way.
The “necessary steps” involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of “People’s Communes“. It was an upheaval that, along with bad weather and a frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.
As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage.
