For centuries, much of China’s best farmland had been in the hands of a small cabal of landlords and aristocratic families, with most everyone else reduced to lives of impoverishment and the indentured servitude of tenancy farming. By simply promising to dismantle this system—and never mind the practical issues involved—Mao went a long way toward winning over China’s rural peasantry, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. This same promise had a devastatingly corrosive effect on Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. Largely composed of conscripts from this same poor rural class, it didn’t
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