ABSTRACT
The Chinese Communist party (CCP) claims to be the leader of an alliance of workers and peasants. The 1982 constitution of the People’s Republic of China asserts as much in its preamble. The party justifies its rule over the Chinese mainland since 1949 on the ground that the CCP has brought a better life by replacing a “feudal, semicolonial” economy with Mao Zedong’s “new democracy” and then with socialism. Workers and entrepreneurs, including countless small businesspeople, have borne enormous burdens, both in their economic capacity as producers and as individual citizens. The chapter focuses on the fate that befell the farmers, private businesspersons, and workers as individual economic categories. It examines the fate of the largest group, the farmers. “Landlords” as a “class” and their family members were only the first major group of victims in the agricultural population. “Rich peasants” were the next principal target.
