IB History Land Reform Movement (1949-1952) and First Five-year Plan Key Definitions

The successive stages of collectivisation in rural China between 1952 and 1958. The first stage (Mutual Aid Teams) involved shared tools and labour; the second (Lower APCs) partially pooled land ownership; the third (Higher APCs) fully pooled land into collective farms. By 1956, virtually all of China's rural population had been collectivised into Higher APCs. The APCs were then merged into the larger People's Communes during the Great Leap Forward in 1958.

The Land Reform Movement was a nationwide campaign in which the Chinese Communist Party redistributed land from landlords and wealthy peasants to poor and landless peasants. Between 1950 and 1952, approximately 43% of China's agricultural land was redistributed to 300 million peasants. The campaign was accompanied by mass "struggle sessions" in which landlords were publicly accused and humiliated. An estimated 1-2 million landlords were executed, and up to 5 million were sent to labour camps.

Under the Sino-Soviet alliance, the USSR provided China with approximately 156 major industrial projects, around 10,000 Soviet technical advisers, and thousands of Chinese students trained in Soviet universities and factories during the 1950s. Soviet assistance was critical to the First Five-Year Plan's success in building steel mills, machinery plants, and military-industrial facilities. When the USSR withdrew its advisers in 1960 during the Sino-Soviet split, many projects were left incomplete, causing significant industrial disruption.