This is now a China Good thread. I'll start:

The Chinese Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a campaign by the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China.[1] The campaign involved mass murder of landlords by tenants and land redistribution to the peasantry.[2] The estimated amount of casualties of the movement ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.[3][4][5] In terms of the communist party's evaluation Zhou Enlai estimated 830,000 had been killed and Mao Zedong estimated as many as 2 to 3 million were killed.[6]

Those who were killed were targeted on the basis of their social class rather than on the basis of their ethnicity; the neologism "classicide" is used to describe the killings.[7] Class-motivated mass killings continued almost throughout the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, and by the end of reforms, the landlord class had been largely eliminated from Mainland China or had fled to Taiwan.[8] By 1953, land reform in most parts of mainland China was completed except in Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the Communist Party of China began to implement collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of "Agricultural Production Cooperatives" transferring property rights from the former landlord class to the Chinese state.

Historian Walter Scheidel writes that the violence of the land reform campaign had a significant impact on economic inequality. He gives as an example the village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton's book Fanshen: In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.[2]