The great thing about China as a country to study for examples of national policy is that China was divided into two parts. After 1949, when the Chinese Nationa

The great thing about China as a country to study for examples of national policy is that China was divided into two parts. After 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (中國國民黨) regime had effective control only of the island of Taiwan and a few offshore islands that are technically parts of other provinces of China, its policy direction could be distinguished from the policy direction of the Communist Party of China (中国共产党) regime ruling the mainland regions of China. Land reform, all over the world, is a crucial problem in national economic development. Taiwan's program of land reform was notably successful[1] and acclaimed in books from a rather leftist perspective[2] by the 1970s. By the 1980s, I was living in Taiwan and occasionally visiting Hong Kong and China during a three-year stay overseas, and I had been continually reading the Chinese press (first in English, and then in the original Chinese) since beginning my study of Chinese language and history in 1975 (while the Cultural Revolution in China was winding down). I've seen a lot of policy claims about China go back and forth over the decades. Plainly, China's Communist government has never been as careful about individual rights or civil liberties as Taiwan's government was even while it was still a one-party dictatorship. (I lived in Taiwan both before and after the mostly peaceful transition to multiparty democratic government with full protection of individual rights and civil liberties there, and China is nowhere near as far along that path as Taiwan already was in the 1970s.) Rural people in China need economically productive employment to continue to advance in prosperity. The country still needs food production, even if it ends up with many fewer farmers, as all other countries do along the path to economic development. Private land rights with actual legally protected sales of those rights can eventually rationalize how land is used for farming, and who lives where. (Many of my uncles and quite a few of my cousins in the United States in 2014 are STILL farmers, generations after when most Americans have stopped being farmers.) The key issue is whether the Communist Party's overwhelming appetite for corruption will allow the needed economic transformation to happen or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Miracle [2] http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-dies-0 http://www.tni.org/tnibook/how-other-half-dies-0