IB History Peasant Support for CCP Notes

Land Reform and Peasant Mobilisation: The CCP's Social Foundation

1. China in 1945 was an overwhelmingly rural country. Around 80% of the population were peasants, most of them poor tenants or landless labourers.
2. Whoever could win their active support would win the war.
3. The CCP had been building that support for over a decade. The GMD had been losing it for just as long.
4. The CCP's core instrument was land reform.
5. In areas under CCP control, the party confiscated land from landlords and wealthy peasants and redistributed it to poor peasants and landless labourers.
6. By 1948 the CCP had redistributed land to over 100 million peasants in liberated areas.

1. For these families, CCP victory meant keeping their land. GMD victory meant its return to the landlords.

How GMD Behaviour Alienated Rural China

1. The GMD's relationship with the rural population was extractive and often violent.
2. Conscription was conducted by force: recruiting officers would enter villages and drag away men, sometimes tying them together to prevent escape.
3. American journalist Theodore White observed GMD conscripts arriving at training camps emaciated and dying from preventable diseases.
4. Grain requisitioning continued throughout the war and into the civil war period, regardless of local harvests. In the Henan famine of 1942-1943, tax collectors took grain from starving families.
5. During the Civil War itself, GMD forces pillaged villages as they retreated, further destroying whatever legitimacy the government retained.
6. Hyperinflation compounded the problem. Fabi currency became worthless so quickly that peasants refused to accept it.
7. The GMD switched to gold yuan notes in August 1948, promising stability and threatening death to anyone who refused them.

1. Within months the gold yuan had collapsed even faster than its predecessor. Urban savers were wiped out, and rural areas abandoned paper money entirely.

Evaluating Peasant Support for CCP Victory

1. The CCP's rural strategy did not begin in 1945. Experience in Jiangxi, the Long March, and Yan'an had already taught cadres how to combine land policy, mass meetings, and military organisation, so wartime mobilisation built on more than a decade of practice.
2. Land reform grew more radical after 1946. CCP teams classified households, ran speak-bitterness meetings that linked personal grievance to party ideology, and redistributed landlord property. Support was not always voluntary: struggle sessions, humiliation, beatings, and killings varied by locality, and party leaders later corrected attacks on middle peasants that had begun to threaten rural production.
3. Peasant support converted directly into military capacity. Recruits joined for reasons ranging from conviction to survival, and villagers supplied grain, transport, and battlefield labour that the encircled Guomindang armies could not match. Communist propaganda contrasted PLA discipline against Nationalist conscription, requisitioning, and pillage.
4. That support was uneven and often conditional rather than uniformly ideological. It mattered most in combination with PLA military strategy and Guomindang collapse: rural mobilisation alone would not have won the war, but the CCP's ability to convert it into recruits and supplies gave the PLA a logistical advantage the Guomindang could not replicate.

1. Peasant support was not a spontaneous uprising: it was the product of a decade of deliberate CCP policy meeting a Guomindang that had exhausted rural patience through conscription, requisition, and monetary collapse.