Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
implementation of Sun Yat-sen's long-delayed land reform program.
Land reform was the Nationalist government's forced redistribution
of farmland to the farmers who actually farmed it.
Land reform program had three stages. During the first stage, which
began in 1949, the Rent Reduction Act was implemented. This speci-
fied that the maximum any landlord could charge farmers was
37.5 percent of their yield. This single act was very popular among
the island's farmers, but the government followed it up in 1951 with
the second stage: the sale of public lands (mostly confiscated from
Japanese officials at war's end) on easy terms and at no interest to
working farmers. (The government made certain that city-dwellers or
former landlords were not allowed to buy the land.) The third stage
of the land reform program, called the Land to the Tiller Act, began
in 1953 and required all wealthy landowning elite families to sell their
land, beyond what they needed for their own sustenance, to the state
at specified prices. The state then sold this land, again at easy terms
and no interest, to tenant farmers. (Fortunately for the Nationalists,
they were not dependent on rich landowning families in Taiwan for
support, so they could afford to confiscate and redistribute their land
with little fear of consequences. A small number of Taiwan's economic
and cultural elite families were unhappy with the land reforms, but
they were largely ignored.)
Many Nationalists were well aware that they had lost the mainland to
the Chinese Communists because of Nationalist neglect of the country-
side. In Taiwan, their last bastion, they were determined that relations
with farmers would be better. Land reform was enormously popular
in Taiwan and considerably improved relations between the Nationalist
government and the island's agricultural population. In its wake mil-
lions of Taiwanese farmers gained title to their own land. Farmers'
income more than doubled over the next few years, and agricultural
productivity soared. Land reform was achieved without the bloodshed
that occurred on the mainland, and it deprived what few communists
there really were in Taiwan of an issue.
THE WHITE TERROR
Safely beyond the reach of the Chinese Communists on the mainland
and hiding behind the skirts of the U.S. military, Chiang Kai-shek
insisted until his death in 1975 that his military and government would
one day return to the mainland in triumph and cleanse it of communist
