Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sometimes small revolutions occur as the consequence of state policy. An example of this phenomenon was the land reform of 1949 to 1953 in Taiwan. During this period, the Guomindang (GMD) government, which had taken control of Taiwan at the end of World War II, undertook a thorough land reform in an effort to disempower local elites, solve problems of economic inequity in the countryside, and carry through an economic strategy that had been espoused by the GMD founder, Sun Yatsen . Land reform resulted in a radical redistribution of wealth in the Taiwanese countryside which had a lasting effect on economics and politics through the twentieth century. It thus amounted to an essentially non-violent, rural, economic “revolution from above” that was guided by a coercive state. When the GMD relocated to Taiwan following its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 , it undertook to carry out, in a much more systematic and meaningful way than it had during its period of rule in China, the economic policies of Sun Yatsen. China's early twentieth-century revolutionary leader, motivated by a desire to see China take control of its own economy, and inspired by western socialist and liberal thinkers, mapped out a strategy for a Chinese economic revolution that would involve nationalization of industry, development of state-owned enterprises, and land reform. Sun himself never had the ... log in or subscribe to read full text