The land reform policies implemented in East-Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan exemplified both successful and failed land ownership systems. All these countries had a relatively shared history of land ownership, with agricultural land concentrated in the hands of wealthy individuals. In this system, peasant farmers rented or sharecropped land belonging to wealthy landowners and this perpetuated inequality within these countries. Land reforms differed across these countries, but there were a lot of similarities as well. China’s land reform history is exceptionally attractive due to several factors, the size of its geographic territory notwithstanding. This fact becomes more apparent when making comparisons to other neighboring countries that faced the same land problems, such as South Korea. While they did achieve the same goal of decentralizing land ownership, these two countries utilized radically different approaches. Comparing and contrasting these two approaches is a surefire way of demystifying the land reforms in these and other East-Asian countries.
Before South Korea initiated its land reform policies, 84% of the populace were either part or full-time tenant farmers. After the US military had defeated the Japanese, it asked the South Korean government to handle land re-distribution. Land reform policies dictated a 3-hectare ceiling on land ownership and this, in turn, meant that citizens owning large tracts had to offload them into the market before the government forcefully repossessed the excess land. The government then resold the appropriated land to peasant farmers at rates of between 1.5 and 1.8 times the land’s annual returns. Before these reforms, 84% of South Koreans were tenant farmers but after their implementation, 89% of citizens were landowners. They were, of course, free to sell their land to interested parties but could not own more than the designated acreage and this egalitarian land ownership model subsequently equalized South Korean incomes across the board.
China had the same land issues such that before land reforms, 30% of the land belonged to just 4% of the population. Unlike South Korea, China underwent a revolution that initiated land re-distribution and by 1955, 90% of the land belonged to 93% of the population. Maoist policies, however, began the collectivization of land ownership later that decade in an attempt to take advantage of the technology available to large-scale holdings. This reform policy proved wildly inefficient and by the early 1980s, the state had repossessed all the land. This land was then redistributed to families based on a per-capita analysis and just like in South Korea, the government placed a ceiling on the maximum land each family could use which in turn increased equality in China. Unlike South Korea, however, the state maintained ownership rights and transferred usufruct and heritable land utilization rights to the land’s beneficiaries.
Both China and South Korea utilized successful land reforms and transformed from unequal societies to more egalitarian ones. China, however, reverted to a flawed ownership system that was problematic and inefficient before going back to a more equalized model. Both of these countries settled with the egalitarian model and the ceiling on the amount of land that families could own maintained this equilibrium. As a result, they both achieved income equalization by placing the needs of the greater populace above those of large landowners. China’s successful reforms also indicate that irrevocable access to land and actual ownership achieve the same goal of redistributing the land regardless of whether the land is privately or state-owned. The South Korean and Chinese reform histories are therefore exemplars of successful albeit differing land reform models that propagated favorable land redistribution and economic equalization.