Dou di zhu

Landlord Classicide under Mao Zedong
Mao-era propaganda for struggle sessions, which were a commons means used to kill landlords.
Location	People's Republic of China
Date	1947–1950 (1947-1976)
Target	Extermination of Landlords
Attack type	Classicide, Mass murder
Deaths	4,500,000 (from 1947-1950) 13,500,000 to 14,250,000 (from 1947-1976)
Perpetrators	Radicalized Chinese Peasants

4,500,000 (from 1947-1950)

Part of Mao Zedong's land reform of the early People's Republic of China was a campaign of classicide (class extermination) that targeted landlords in order to redistribute land to the peasant class. It resulted in millions of deaths. Those killed were targeted on the basis of class rather than ethnicity, so terming the campaign genocide is, sensu stricto, incorrect. The neologism classicide is more accurate. Class motivated mass killings continued through the almost 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China resulting in the deaths of 90% to 95% of the what used to be 15 million members of the landlord class in China according to Harry Wu.

In 1946, three years before the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), The Communist Party of China launched a thorough land reform, which won the party millions of supporters among the poor and middle peasantry. The land and other property of landlords were expropriated and redistributed so that each household in a rural village would have a comparable holding. This agrarian revolution was made famous in the West by William Hinton's book Fanshen.

The idea of a mass extermination of the landlord class was already planned by 1947 by Jung Chang an expert on terror tactics.Ren Bishi, a member of the party's Central Committee, likewise stated in a 1948 speech that "30,000,000 landlords and rich peasants would have to be destroyed." Shortly after the founding of the PRC, land reform, according to Mao biographer Philip Short, "lurched violently to the left" with Mao laying down new guidelines for "not correcting excesses prematurely."

Mao in this vein insisted that the people themselves, not the security organs, should become involved in killing landlords who had oppressed them. This was quite different from the Soviet practice, in which the NKVD would arrest counterrevolutionaries and then have them secretly executed and often buried before sunrise. Mao thought that peasants who killed landlords with their bare hands would become permanently linked to the revolutionary process in a way that passive spectators could not be. The campaign of extermination against landlords took place in gratuitous brutality with reports of forced drowning, landlords being burned alive in hot oil, and infanticide. Even those who simply did not outright denounce landlords would be subject to stoning. The killing eventually gave rise to the saying "dou di zhu", or "fight the landlord" which was used by Mao to build support for the party.