this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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I've also had success explaining to people that while Mao may have facilitated or encouraged what happened, it's not like he personally sentenced all landlords to death. They were brought to trial and sentenced before their own tenants who testified as witnesses, many of whom were starved, brutalized, or had family killed by those same landlords in the past when unable to pay their rent or for organizing for their rights as tenants.
People are more sympathetic when tenants are the ones responsible, but they'll still hit you with "private property, bro" sometimes.
The word landlord doesn't really describe "地主" accurately enough, since they weren't just rent seeking parasites, they were more like feudal lords who had power over every aspect of life in the village, with all the exploitation and violence that implies. That's why villagers were so brutal towards most of their landlords because they were frequently engaged in beatings, sexual assault, psychological abuse, dispossession of peasants etc with complete impunity. They were far worse than some petit bourgeois failson who inherited an apartment building from their car dealership dad or something (though they go to gulag too).
"Uhh, if you like your landlord, you'll be able to keep your landlord"
I feel very privileged that most of my friends' brainworms are essentially cultural issues and poor solidarity. The only person I had argue back is a friend who also believes in class warfare, and I'm pretty sure is just fucking with me half the time.
Are there good documentaries, articles or books about this that I can forward to people I know?
I'm also curious for these recommendations!
I have to admit I don't have anything that goes into this in detail, or maybe I do but I haven't read those books yet, but I'm piecing things together.
The People's History of Ideas podcast is REALLY good to get insight into pre-revolutionary China, but it's very dry and not yet finished after many years. The guy who does it is apparently a professor and is very knowledgeable, his discussion about what tenants went through under landlords and Mao's history as a peasant-tenant organizer made everything click in terms of why people were so ready to kill landlords and why Mao permitted it. Totally understandable, honestly.
I can't remember what I've engaged with in terms of the trials and Cultural Revolution era type stuff anymore. This is the only article I could find in my bookmarks at this point: https://archive.is/41gu3
@Lavender@hexbear.net I strongly recommend reading 'Fanshen' which is a classic account of land reform in a single village.
The documentary 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains', in the chapter 'A Woman, A Family' contains a horrific description of one woman's life during landlord rule.
Thank you, I will!
Let's be fair here, I'm pretty sure those were overwhelmingly kangaroo trials (something that Che, for example, took great pains to avoid by making sure judge and jury weren't personally the victims of a given defendant). I don't actually have a problem with them being kangaroo trials, because they served an urgent social utility of dissolving a worse-than-worthless class that was forcing peasants to pay literally like 9/10 of their harvest as rent, but it was definitely more of a country-wide mob justice thing than trials in any sort of orderly or fair sense. At least, that's my understanding of what happened.
Yeah, but I'm okay with that.