"Land to the Tiller"

The "Land to the Tiller" program was an essential stage of the extensive land reforms the ROC administration implemented, as part of a more comprehensive campaign to resuscitate Taiwan's, at the time mainly agrarian, economy, and establish the foundation for a future export-oriented economy.

The program saw land holdings above a set size be broken up and sold to the tenants to whom it was rented at the generous price of slightly over twice the annual yield. It was initiated in 1953, four years after the capping tenants' rents at 37.5% of the harvest's value, a drastic reduction from the previously common 50-70%. Large pre-existing public lands, mainly those seized from the Japanese, were also redistributed among tenants earlier in 1951.

The policy successfully created a more equitable distribution of land, reduced farmers' land costs, diminished landlords' political power, halved the amount of leased land and doubled the amount of farm owning families by giving land to nearly 200,000 tenant families², and generally increased agricultural productivity by 50% by 1963.³

---

Related links

• Economic Stabilisation Board
• Republic of China

---

References

1. Rigger, S. (2011). Building Taiwan. In: Why Taiwan Matters. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
2. Wang, C. (2007). A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered, 1949-1970. In: Taiwan: A New History. Routledge.
3. Manthorpe, J. (2008). Reform and Terror. In: Forbidden Nation: a History of Taiwan. St. Martin’s Griffin.
4. Metzler, J.J. (2017). Free China; Cold War Fortress 1951-1971. In: Taiwan’s Transformation: 1895 to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan.
5. Rubinstein, M.A. (1994). Introduction: ‘The Taiwan Miracle’. In: The Other Taiwan 1945-92. M.E. Sharpe.
6. Fulda, A. (2020). The Rise and Demise of the KMT Party-State in Taiwan. In: The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Routledge.