Land reform – more precisely, re-distributive land reform – was the decisive event in the post-war histories of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. East Asian re-distributive land reform was very different in its scale and scope to the rent reduction campaigns (also called land reform) so characteristic of South Asian and other developing countries. By breaking the power of the landlord class, by raising yields, and by releasing a rural surplus which could be used for investment instead of conspicuous consumption, land reform ushered in a new era of rural prosperity. And by releasing labour from farm work, land reform paved the way for the breakneck industrialization that ultimately transformed the societies of East Asia.

In the Chinese case, the seismic impact of land reform has been rather lost amidst the compelling dramas of collectivization, the coming of the commune, and the reversal of verdicts of the early 1980s, which extinguished the collectives and restored the family farming of the early 1950s. Land reform is in fact one of the few post-1949 events of which the Party can talk with a relatively undistorted voice. To be sure, the re-distribution of land was achieved at a cost; even Mao was prepared to admit that 400,000 died during the campaign of 1946–1953, though few have shed many tears for the fate of the landlord class. And by empowering the rich peasantry, Chinese land reform contained the seeds of its own destruction; no Marxist regime could ultimately tolerate the presence in the countryside of the embryonic capitalist class which the newly empowered rich peasantry seemed destined to become. But when measured against the devastating famine which followed the Leap of 1958, or the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, land reform was an undeniable triumph. The Party feels a compelling need to expunge the Leap and the Cultural Revolution from the pages of its history to keep the historical nihilists at bay, but it has few such qualms in telling (albeit rather badly) the tale of land reform. For all these reasons, the drama of Chinese land reform deserves epic treatment. Yet curiously, it remains under-researched. There is, for example, no compelling macro account that is both sweeping in its treatment and yet takes full account of the source materials which have become available since 1978. Instead, land reform detains most scholars for at best a cursory chapter, as their pens rush on to the cataclysmic events of the late 1950s. And even at a local level, accounts are comparatively scarce. To be sure, it is hard to improve upon the work of William Hinton, not least because he told the story with verve and with the zeal of one sharing the lives of the Chinese peasantry. But manifestly there is much more to be written.

Matthew Noellert's Power over Property is not that epic work. However, it goes some way towards filling this gap in our knowledge. Noellert's focus is the experience of Shuangcheng county, located immediately to the southwest of Harbin city, between 1946 and 1948. The book is unusual in that it is a county-level study, rather than an account of the experience of a single village. Noellert thus sets himself the task of synthesizing a plethora of archival and household materials (as well some interviews) drawn from across what was a large Chinese county; Shuangcheng's population at the time of the 1953 census was 411,000. To be sure, Shuangcheng was not very representative of China. Its location on the fertile Songjiang plain and astride the Harbin–Dalian railway meant that it was a relatively prosperous county. As Noellert says “Favorable ecological conditions meant that Shuangcheng … was ideal for farming” (p. 35), and this soil fertility and the presence of the railway made it a very substantial supplier of commercial grain to Harbin and to other urban centres. Shuangcheng's land ownership appears to have been very unequal (pp. 39–40). However, the lack of absolute poverty (at least by Chinese standards) meant that the appetite for class struggle was correspondingly diminished; here at least, ripples did not drown the peasantry. A more salient issue was hostility towards those perceived to have collaborated with the Japanese, and this often contributed to inter-village conflicts. Moreover, the violence of the land reform programme was affected by ongoing civil war in a way that was not true of localities which began their land reform after 1949.

That Shuangcheng was unrepresentative of rural China is in the nature of local studies. The central question is therefore whether niche studies such as this offer insight, not whether the experience can be generalized. And on this question of offering insight, Noellert does a fine job. Power over Property is not the sort of rattling good read than makes Fanshen so appealing, but it is a much more nuanced and sophisticated academic treatment. It is in its essentials a straightforward descriptive study of the land reform process (albeit with an over-blown and rather unnecessary theoretical apparatus grafted on to it). The conclusions are not especially novel. Probably the most important of them stems from the introduction of a spatial component to the analysis. Studying a county rather than just a village, Noellert enriches our understanding of land reform by showing that disputes over property between villages within Shuangcheng were as much a driver of conflict as the class-based violence centred on land expropriation that is the staple of village studies. He also shows that much of the violence within villages, whether struggle, detention or execution, was directed against those deemed corrupt or collaborationist, not merely against those in possession of large amounts of land. Land reform in Shuangcheng was a settling of accounts as much as it was a re-distribution of land and property. Now none of this is exactly new; the classic accounts of Hinton and others revealed that the land reform movement was as much about vengeance as it was about hunger for land. Nevertheless, by shifting the focus away from class struggle as the defining characteristic of land reform, Noellert provides a more plausible multi-dimensional perspective on the process. And this perspective is rendered convincing because it is well-grounded in the evidence: Noellert has gained access to a vast array of county archives. These registers cover categories such as escaped landlords, executed criminals, victims of struggle and those whose land was expropriated. They are no doubt available because the period between 1946 and 1948 is part of the twilight zone between Communist and Nationalist rule; it is therefore not a part of the history of the People's Republic. And what that makes possible is a richly textured account of the detail of the land reform process. Such attention to detail is undeniably impressive, and in the process Noellert sets new standards for the sort of scholarship which is now possible, albeit for some of the less controversial subjects in recent Chinese history. We await the definitive work on land reform, but Power over Property is a step on the quest towards that grail.