Land Reform in the Southern Yunnan Muslim Community: Growing Divergence Beneath the Socialist Rhetoric of Unity, 1949–1958

As one of the most influential CCP campaigns that dramatically transformed the Chinese
pre-revolutionary society, the early 1950s land reform has not been fully explored in the
case of China’s ethnic periphery. This article sheds light on the CCP’s land reform and its
impact on China’s ethnic frontier by examining the official policies, implementation, and
the reactions of the southern Muslim community in Yunnan between 1949 and 1958.
Drawing on county government work team reports and the Party’s land reform policy
and evaluation records, it argues that although southern Yunnan Muslims were able to
selectively internalize some Communist secular ideologies to cope with social and political
changes that land reform brought about, the inconsistency between the Party’s freedom of
religion policy on paper and its local implementation failed to mitigate the ideological
discord between Maoist revolutionaries’ atheist worldview and Muslim villagers’ religiosity. This jeopardized the possibility of reconciliation between the class-struggle-focused
radical state and the community life of its religious subjects.