Maoist Massacres of Landlords

Landlord Classicide under Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong proclaiming the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949
Location	People's Republic of China
Date	1948-50
Deaths	4,500,000
Perpetrators	Radicalized Chinese Peasants

During Mao Zedong's land reform at the birth of the People's Republic of China a campaign of classicide (class extermination) was committed against landlords in order to redistribute land to the peasant class of China that resulted in the deaths of millions. As those targeted were killed on the basis of class rather than ethnicity regarding this atrocity as an example of Mao Zedong genocide is anachronistic thus the neologism classicide is more accurate.

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.

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 the killing of landlords who had oppressed them. This was quite different from 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.