Selecting Loyal Agents: Land Reform as a Party-Building Strategy in Post-Revolutionary China

This paper examines the political significance of land reform as a strategic instrument for party building in authoritarian regimes, focusing on the early People's Republic of China. By targeting pre-revolutionary elites and mobilizing poor peasants against them, the land reform enabled the selection of loyal agents committed to the Party's ideology. Using county-level data on the staggered rollout of land reform, we find that the completion of land reform was associated with rapid increases in party membership and the establishment of local branches. The Party's expansion was especially pronounced in areas with a stronger presence of pre-revolutionary elites rather than in areas with greater land inequality, and newly recruited Party members disproportionately came from lower socioeconomic groups. These local party structures, in turn, facilitated broader policy goals such as fiscal extraction and rural collectivization. Our findings highlight how land reform and grassroots political recruitment operated in tandem to strengthen authoritarian rule in revolutionary contexts.