In the first years of the People's Republic the Communist Party carried out two overlapping campaigns. Land reform, carried out across the countryside between 1950 and 1953, classified rural households by class, redistributed landlords' land and property, and mobilised villagers in 'speaking bitterness' and struggle sessions, which Jeffrey Javed's Harvard study describes as the world's largest and most violent land reform. The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, which Yang Kuisong calls the first campaign of the People's Republic aimed at cleansing opposition elements, targeted former officials, 'bandits' and 'evil tyrants' among others; Zhou Xun reports that a February 1951 Central Committee meeting agreed a guideline of executing one person per thousand, and that Mao urged killings 'fast and thorough like blast rain'. According to the official 1954 report, the security campaign arrested 2.62 million people and executed 712,000; Yang Kuisong and Frank Dikötter argue the true number of executions was higher, and Zhou's archival work in Sichuan and Guizhou shows killing far exceeding quotas, with villagers beaten and tortured to death in land-reform struggles. Yang Kuisong and Julia Strauss analyse the security campaign as part of the new regime's consolidation of power through state-sponsored terror.
The Chinese Communist Party and the new People's Republic, through work teams, people's tribunals, the security police and village militias, killed, imprisoned and placed under surveillance landlords, former Nationalist officials and alleged counterrevolutionaries
The lower bound reflects the official figure of 712,000 executions in the security campaign together with Mao's own claim of about one million landlords executed and Stavis's estimate of over one million land-reform deaths; because the categories overlap, no figure below one million is defensible. Yang Kuisong and Dikötter argue official execution figures understate the toll, and Javed notes most land-reform estimates fall 'in the low millions', with Teiwes citing one to two million executed. The upper bound is Jürgen Domes's estimate of five million killed in land reform, the highest scholarly figure cited by Javed and an outlier. Deaths include beatings and torture in village struggle sessions and suicides as well as judicial executions.
Zhou Xun's archival research documents execution quotas, killings and torture to death in land reform in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, and Jeffrey Javed and Yang Kuisong document the official totals of executions, imprisonment and 'control' and the use of mass accusation sessions leading to executions.
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