Sarah Paine

And he had a little bit later.

And he had a very bureaucratic way of redistributing land.

The approval of class status, he said, it's a life and death decision for the person in question.

And so it starts out with a vote at the local level, and then it goes through many layers of party approval before being sent back to the local level to announce who's going to get the land and who's going to take a bullet.

And then Mao leverages the enthusiasm of this movement for the people who are going to get the land, the other people not so much.

And he's going to leverage this enthusiasm to get people to join the party and also to join the army.

All right.

Mao is planning to collectivize all land.

That's what the communists are going to do.

But he says, look, the system of landlords and tenants cannot be completely destroyed yet.

because he needs the peasants to join him and their peasants desperately want land.

Mao gives it to them and he gets a great deal of support for doing this, but he also keeps the rich peasants around too.

This is a deleted portion of the collected works because rich peasant production is indispensable until he wins the Civil War and can then turn the guns on them.

And he's also got a duplicitous program for the middle peasants.

It's a big bait and switch.

It looks like you're gonna get, see, you got the land?

Well, now you do, and now you don't, because at the end, they're all gonna lose their land.

In order to reform, to get the land,

Mao is talking about a red terror, to get it.

While he was still with the Nationalists, he wrote a report on the peasant movement in Hunan, where he's talking about taking all the land from the landlord class and shooting them, and that won't cut it with the Nationalist army because their officers are landlords.