ABSTRACT
During the third revolutionary civil war, the Nationalists and Chinese Communists waged their final campaigns for leadership over China and for the allegiance of the Chinese people. During their experimentation with the peasant movement in the 1920s, some Chinese Communists had relied on agrarian reform for mobilizing military and political support from the rural population. The radicalization of the Communist agrarian reform program can be seen as a response to the strategic and political pressures of the civil war. There remained many dissatisfied peasants in the liberated areas who had not benefited from earlier land reforms. The measures adopted at the National Land Conference for party purification were implemented at every level of the Chinese Communist Party from the top down in the months that followed. In most cases, the implementation of the Outline of the Land Law and party purification did not reach the grass-roots level until 1948.
