Between Scylla and Charybdis: Land Reform and Local Agents Under the Chinese Communist Regime

What determines the process and scale of socioeconomic reform—such as land redistribution—in a new political regime? While the existing literature on land reform has emphasized the role of coalitions and class dynamics, I argue that central-local dynamics play a prominent part in determining a regime’s redistributive ambitions. Using the case of the National Land Reform Campaign (1950–1953) under the nascent Chinese Communist Regime as the empirical focus, I find that the subnational variation in redistributive outcomes was the result of central overseers tolerating policy ineffectiveness of some local agents, but intervening against others. This variation can be traced to the regime principal’s discriminatory attitudes toward different types of local agents in the new revolutionary bureaucracy: centrally deployed versus locally embedded agents. Using a most similar case design involving two Chinese provinces (Zhejiang and Guangdong), I draw from primary and secondary historical sources to trace how the two provinces diverged in redistributive outcomes despite shared political and socioeconomic backgrounds. I suggest that historical contingencies such as wartime guerrilla mobilization and the post-1949 military occupation environment shaped the initial composition of regime agents, leading to the tolerance of centrally deployed agents in Zhejiang, and sanctions toward locally embedded agents in Guangdong.