So I've read the book "Fanshen: a documentary of revolution in a Chinese village" by William Hinton - which documents firsthand the land reform campaigns (1945-49) in the countryside of China during the conclusion of the Civil War period. In studying Xi Jinping's

Poverty Alleviation Campaign, it's like I'm constantly getting deja vu.

For those who aren't too familiar with the land reform in China during the Civil War period, let me try and explain.

Hundreds of millions of peasants lived in the countryside, and something like 40% owned

no land at all, and were totally at the mercy of the landlord class, often having to work as slaves in exchange for shelter and crumbs of food, or even being forced to sell their wife or child for a bag of rice to survive the winter.

These people often didn't even have the means to clothe themselves. It wasn't uncommon to have a family share one pair of pants, for instance, even in the winter.

Another 40% or so of these peasants owned *some* land and/or housing, but their position was so precarious that

they could lose everything in one day, if their only plough was broken or something. These people's position was so precarious that often, in order to keep their home over the winter, they had to scavenge for roots, bark and leaves to mix with their millet.

Then there was another class, a "middle class" of petty-bourgeois peasants who made up maybe 10-15% of the peasants. These owned just enough land in order to be comfortable, and even be able to pay for some hired labor. Then there were the landlords.

These made up only 5-10% of the population, and owned about 90% of all land, most of which they cultivated using slave labor. They treated these slaves worse than dirt. I remember a story about a slave eating an apple from a landlord's tree, and being dumped in a well, head-first

These were the conditions peasants were living in in 1945. Mao correctly analyzed the situation from a materialist perspective, and said "if we can solve the agrarian question, then we can and will win this war.". Campaigns for land reform were carried out in every village.

This involved cadre coming in to live/work with the villagers, to understand their conditions firsthand in a way that no inspector from out of town possibly could. They then held town meetings where each family was classified into a few sub-groups depending on how much wealth and

property they had within the last 3 years. This was the foundation upon which land reform plans could be formulated and carried out. It was important that villagers were honest about what they had, and didn't have, and their neighbors kept them honest.

If someone "forgot" to mention the mule they owned, or the extra barrel of millet they had, or a handcart, etc, their neighbors would call them out. This way, each family got an accurate assessment of how much property they either had to give away, or were entitled to receive.

This process went through a number of rectifications, and was revisited over and over to determine if the original classifications were accurate; they may have been wrong, or situations may have changed which warranted classifying families differently.

With that said, now I want to go into Xi Jinping's Poverty Alleviation Campaign, and I hope that my readers will experience the same deja vu I feel when learning about it.

To start with, watch this documentary:



Everything I say here is described in

detail in that documentary, and you can see the work of many cadre on the front lines of this campaign.

In Mao's time, during land reform, tens of thousands of cadre were sent to the countryside to carry out the land reform campaign I described. Under Xi, over 1,000,000 cadre

have been dispatched to live/work in remote villages, often for years at a time - in fact, they have been instructed that they are not allowed to leave their village until it has been lifted out of poverty. To do so is considered abandoning their post, and going AWOL.

These cadre work with the locals in everything they need help doing, and develop strong bonds with the peasants they work with, bonds of deep trust and reciprocal love. They work with the locals to develop the plans THEY, the locals, want to enact, to lift them out of poverty.

Then they go to their Party Committees, discuss these ideas, come up with plans, slogans and campaign strategies in which to implement the ideas put forward by the villagers, and to galvanize popular support behind these programs through the use of propaganda, etc.

In other words, they use the Mass Line.

The provincial, district and township-level governments all have plans and directives in order to achieve the goal of eliminating extreme poverty.

EVERY SINGLE FAMILY in rural China is tracked INDIVIDUALLY, in order to see how far they've

come toward lifting themselves out of poverty, and cadre in village-level government work on the ground to collect this data, and help with implementing the plans the peasants developed.

Families are tracked individually, but it is not the central government who decides when/if

a family has been lifted out of poverty. This is done in meetings at the village-level which, from my reading of "Fanshen", are almost identical to the meetings which took place during Land Reform.

These are known as "democratic appraisal meetings". Go to 14:20 in the

above-linked documentary to see one of these meetings take place. In these meetings, just as in the meetings during Land Reform under Mao, villagers classify each other according to their income, wealth and property, and collectively determine who needs help the most.

NO family can be said to have been "lifted out of poverty" unless their neighbors all unanimously agree on it. So not only does the CPC use a higher standard for what is considered "absolute poverty" than the World Bank; they also don't rely on that standard alone.

Rather, it is the peasants themselves who make the ultimate determination as to who has been lifted out of extreme poverty, and who hasn't been.

Efforts which have been undertaken across China involve the assisting of setting up cooperatives and communes,

building entire cities and relocating people (only with their consent) into apartments with free or highly subsidized rent, where the state gives them a job upon arrival, and pays for graduate-level education for all impoverished students, including all living expenses.

I hope that this thread shows that the revolution in the People's Republic of China has continued unabated since before 1949, and that they are committed to achieving their Two Centenary Goals; and that the power of the CPC is based in a deep love and connection with the people.

I forgot to add - the current campaign is also subject to more third-party oversight than the Land Reform campaign under Mao. Every year, thousands of fresh graduates from universities are sent to the countryside to inspect the progress of the Campaign.

These third-party inspectors are sent to a township (a section of a district, which usually has a few villages in it), and then head out the next morning for the village they will inspect. They don't announce where they are headed, they show up unannounced.

This is yet another level of transparency and accountability put in place by the CPC to ensure that the Mass Line is working effectively.