Chinese Communist Land Reform

During the later Chinese Civil War, Communist authorities expanded campaigns to confiscate land from landlords and redistribute it to poorer peasants. After the People’s Republic was established in 1949, the Agrarian Reform Law extended the process across most of the mainland and reorganised rural society through class labels, village meetings and work teams.

Redistribution weakened the old rural elite and gave many peasants access to land, but struggle sessions, imprisonment and executions accompanied the campaign. The new pattern of private peasant ownership was short-lived, because collectivisation soon absorbed farms into cooperatives and, later, people’s communes.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out begins with the execution of Ximen Nao as a landlord and returns him to his former property in animal form. The novel treats land reform as both a social revolution and the originating injustice from which its family saga and cycle of resentment develop.