16 { China’s Quest
the CCP’s “land to the tiller” policy meant that land owned by landlords and
“rich peasants” was seized and distributed among landless or poor peasants.
The household property of landowners was also distributed among the village
poor. The landlords themselves received rough justice by revolutionary tribu-
nals headed by CCP activists. The result was bloody—several million land-
lords and their minions were killed—but probably popular, at least among
poor and landless peasants.
But again, once power was in their hands, CCP policy switched. The CCP’s
Marxist-Leninist ideology and the workings of the Soviet socialist economic
model required that China’s farmers surrender to the state their recently re-
ceived parcels of land along with draft animals and farm implements. All
these were then merged into collective farms run by cadres appointed by
and loyal to the CCP. Following collectivization in 1957–1958, China’s peas-
ants were not even employees of the state, since employees receive a wage for
their labor and can switch employers if they wish. Peasants on PRC collec-
tive farms effectively became serfs who received most of their compensation
in kind, in rations, and only a tiny amount in cash pay. They were fixed to
the land politically and economically, requiring cadre approval to leave their
collective farm or move to urban areas. Their work was supervised by cadre
overlords who demanded long and hard labor to meet the quotas imposed by
their superiors. Rural cadres had vast and arbitrary power over the farmers
subject to them. Once the entire state system of comprehensive planning and
collectivized farming was in place, wealth was sucked out of the agricultural
sector to feed the hyperindustrialization drive. Urban dwellers fared some-
what better, but not much. Virtually the entire populace of China during the
Mao era was poor. The wealth they produced fed voracious industrial growth,
not better living standards. Several generations of Chinese were doomed to
lives of state-imposed poverty for the sake of rapid growth of state-planned
and mammothly inefficient industry. Close alliance with the USSR and con-
frontation with the United States were foreign policy correlates of this drive.
In the political arena as well, the policies pursued by the CCP before seizing
power in 1949 were starkly different from the program delivered afterward.
The CCP won the post–World War II contest with the KMT on the basis of
a program promising “New Democracy.” It was long a popular belief in the
West that democracy was contrary to China’s long Confucian tradition of
benevolent authoritarianism and was, thus, essentially irrelevant to China’s
politics. Columbia University professor Andrew Nathan convincingly chal-
lenged this hoary belief by demonstrating the substantial degree to which
concepts of individual civil freedom (freedom of speech, publication, corre-
spondence, etc.) and democratic self-government (popular sovereignty, elec-
tion and recall, etc.) were enshrined in China’s eleven constitutions between
1908 and 1982. While those constitutions were often not implemented, or were
implemented in a way distorted by dictatorial government, Nathan argued