Non-people in the People’s Republic: ‘Landlords’ and ‘rich peasants’ under Maoist state socialism

Thesis

For some thirty years, a substantial minority of the Chinese population was excluded from the political and moral community of the People. The largest number of non-People were the only literal ‘class’ enemies in the People’s Republic: those labelled ‘landlords’ and ‘rich peasants’ during land reform by reference to their socioeconomic position in rural society before the revolution. This thesis is a political, cultural, and social history of this group. It approaches the ‘landlord-rich peasant question’ as a single subject, one which originated in the 1920s, was central to politics, culture, and social life in the Mao era, and which, in a number of sometimes unexpected ways, continued well into the Reform era.

Existing scholarship is unanimous that class labels were a hugely important feature of political and social life in the Mao era. This thesis argues that the categories of landlord and rich peasant were more central among ‘bad’ labels than most scholarship has appreciated, and that those identified as landlords and rich peasants by the CCP bore much of the human cost of the three-decade long centrality of the divide between the People and their enemies in Chinese political and social life. It also shows, however, that the permanence and heredity of these labels observed under late Maoism was not part of a consciously designed system: during the early People’s Republic, a significant minority of class enemy labels were removed, and many young people from such families were able to find a place in the new society.

The eventual permanence and heredity of class enemy labels was instead the outcome of a contingent historical process, with major turning points in 1957 and especially 1962. These features always remained in tension with ideological and policy commitments to reform and non-heritability, which the Party maintained even as it carried out a systematic campaign to re-stigmatize class enemies after 1962. In post-1962 China, where the narrative of ‘class struggle’ permeated political and social life, ‘reform’ tended to become little more than a justification for a series of coercive and demeaning practices, and non-heritability the grounds for forcing those from class enemy families to demonstrate that they had come to hate their own parents. But when Chinese political life was redirected away from class struggle after 1978, the Party could proclaim that it had completed its mission of reforming class enemies, and that the mistreatment of their children and grandchildren had been a violation of policies that the Party had been committed to all along.

Authors: Czeller, MA

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mzdmjyken
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: class enemies; landlords and rich peasants; friend-enemy binary; Maoist China
• Subjects: Enemies; Socialism; History, Modern; Modern China