Four economists including one from Duke University and three from Harvard who are all pro-capitalist and who do extensive work on U.S. Government grants--Malcolm Gillis, Dwight H. Perkins, Michael Roemer and Donald Snodgrass have explained land reform very clearly. It just so happens their explanation shows that the countries that copied Mao-style land reform were the ones that had economic growth if the United $tates agreed to serve as an export market in addition.

The four economists explain the whole idea here:

"A society with a large tenant and landless laborer population that is controlled by other classes may find itself faced with increasing rural unrest. To keep this unrest from blowing up into a revolution, land reform bills are passed to reduce the burden on the peasantry and to give them a stake in continued stability. In the second type, land reform takes place after a revolution supported by the rural poor has occurred. . .

"The motive behind the Mexican land reforms of the twentieth century, for example, has been largely of the first type. . . To meet the challenge of Zapata and people like him, the Mexican government has periodically redistributed some arable land, most recently under the government of President Echeverria in the 1970s. Mexican land-tenure relations, however, continue to be characterized by large estates existing alongside small peasant holdings. Reform eliminated some of the more extreme forms of pressure for more radical change, but Mexican agriculture still includes a large, poor, and not very productive rural peasant class.

"The Chinese land reform of the 1940s and early 1950s under the leadership of the Communist party was a reform par excellence of the second type. The Communist revolution had been built primarily on the rural poor, and the landlord class was one of the main pillars of support of the existing Kuomintang government. Prior to the reform some 40 percent of the arable land had been farmed by tenants who typically paid half their main crop to the landlord as rent. The landlord, whether resident in the village or absentee, contributed little or nothing other than the land. After the reform, and prior to the collectivization of agriculture in 1955 to 1956, land was owned by the tiller and the landlord received no compensation whatsoever. In fact many landlords were tried publicly in the villages and either executed or sent off to perform hard labor under harsh conditions.

"The Japanese land reform that followed World War II was different in important respects from the Chinese experience. Land reform in Japan was carried out by the U.S. Occupation forces. The Occupation government believed that the landlord class had been an important supporter of the forces in Japanese society that brought about World War II. Small peasant proprietors, in contrast, were seen as a solid basis on which to build a future democratic and stable Japan. Since the Americans had won the war, Japanese landlords were not in a position to offer resistance to reform, and a thoroughgoing reform was carried out. Compensation of landlords was provided for in legislation, but inflation soon had the effect of sharply reducing the real value of amounts offered. As a result Japanese land reform also amounted to confiscation of landlord land with little compensation. . . .

"The best-known successful land reforms have commonly involved little or no compensation for confiscated assets of landlords. Such was the case in Russia after 1917 and China after 1949, as well as in the Japanese and South Korean reforms after World War II."

(Economics of Development, 3rd ed. (W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), pp. 496-499.

Capitalist propagandists have to talk about a tiny minority of countries in the world to justify their claims to success for their blood-soaked and militarily unstable system. Specifically they focus on Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and southern Korea instead of the overall average of 150 capitalist or capitalist and semi-feudal countries. Instead of doing honest scientific comparisons, these propagandists pick and choose their data to support their conclusions. They don't take all the countries where private property rights are guaranteed and compare them with China and other socialist countries.

Singapore and Hong Kong are cities and should not be compared with countries that are mostly peasant as in the Third World. Calcutta, India should be compared with Shanghai, China, but cities that developed on their own are already an economic success in a sense and not a good comparison.

What do Taiwan and southern Korea have in common that the other 150 countries do not? The United $tates's ally Chiang Kai-shek was kicked out of China into Taiwan and in Korea into southern Korea--by Mao in the case of Taiwan and Mao's troops and the anti-imperialist Korean masses in the case of southern Korea. In other words, the U$A saw these two places as bases on the front-lines of war against communism and they were. To prop them up was a leading goal of U.S. foreign policy. We can say the U.$. imperialists succeeded in their efforts not to let Taiwan and southern Korea face the same problems other Third World countries faced.

In fact, what these two places had in common was great pressure against the United $tates created by Mao's successful communist movement. Without that pressure, Taiwan and southern Korea never would have had the chance to develop that they did.