ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong stood in triumph at the Gate of Heavenly Peace to announce the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949: "We, the 450 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright." Mao spoke of a sense of Chinese identity far removed from the China subjected to foreign powers. In terms of practical policies, Mao looked to the mass line and mass campaigns as structures through which to mobilize the willpower of the people. The problem, as will become apparent, is that sometimes Mao's "revolutionary romanticism" had a way of soaring out of control, with insufficient grounding in reality. Land reform in the North took place mostly before and during the civil war, whereas in the South it happened after the establishment of the new national government. Therefore, the party's approach to land reform varied according to the time when it occurred; it was time- and space-specific.
