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In the months before redistribution began, the Ministry of Agriculture estimated there were 250,000 cases of landlords attempting to retain their land by taking it back from their tenants. But the land committees, which were required to review all transfers that attempted to circumvent land reform, managed to reverse almost all of them. Despite this, only 110 incidents of violence between landlords and tenants were reported in the reform years 1947–8 and not one life was lost. The agricultural historian Ronald Dore remarks: ‘The very fact that it [the reform] was imposed from outside was a powerful factor in making the land reform a peaceful and orderly one. Tenants could take over the land, not with the light of revolution in their eyes but half-apologetically, as if it hurt them more than it hurt their landlords, for the cause was not in themselves but in a law for which they bore no responsibility either personally or collectively.’
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
Then the being kneeling before the formation made a sound, a series of sounds that far exceeded the ant’s capacity to comprehend: “It’s a wonder to be alive. If you don’t understand that, how can you search for anything deeper?”
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
“Those two axioms are solid enough from a sociological perspective … but you rattled them off so quickly, like you’d already worked them out,” Luo Ji said, a little surprised. “I’ve been thinking about this for most of my life, but I’ve never spoken about it with anyone before. I don’t know why, really.… One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion, and the technological explosion.”
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
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