How authoritarians turn rural areas into their strongholds
ACROSS the world, leaders withhold property rights to cement their control even as they impoverish their own people.
Development economists typically tell a compelling story about land reform: Countries can supercharge their development by leveling inequality and radically reallocating assets. In east Asia, nations that followed this simple formula transformed themselves into economic powerhouses.
So why haven’t more countries adopted this well-established blueprint? The governments that have the will and capacity to adopt major land reforms are typically authoritarian. Most authoritarian governments seek first and foremost to entrench their power.
These governments would rather control their rural populations than see them thrive and become autonomous. For authoritarians, land reform is a convenient tool to destroy rival elites in the countryside while entangling rural workers in the tentacles of authoritarian influence.
What distinguishes these two approaches isn’t the reallocation of the land. In both cases, governments redistribute property to broad swaths of their people.
Authoritarian regimes, though, unless they face pressure from foreign powers or seek to stave off some existential threat, hand out property without also distributing secure property rights, forcing land beneficiaries into a relationship of perpetual dependence. Land reform, it turns out, isn’t just a path to prosperity — it can also be the means by which authoritarian regimes cement their control even as they impoverish their own people. Land reform has been one of the most transformational public policies of the past two centuries. South Korea provides a classic example of its benefits. Until World War II, the country was impoverished and feudal.
The Korean War wreaked havoc on its economy. South Korea then sought to eliminate Japanese colonial influence and shore up its selfsufficiency through radical land reform. The government expropriated all landholdings larger than three hectares, then granted land to poor tenant farmers — many of whom tended small rice paddies — and supported them with favorable agriculture policies.
For the first time in Korean history, these farmers sent their children to school instead of to the fields. Within a generation, the country became urban and well educated, home to a booming economy.
Similar transformations followed land reform in Japan and Taiwan. Joe Studwell’s 2014 book, How Asia Works, nails the formula: Cultivate a small farming sector, use the surplus to build export-oriented manufacturing, and nurture these sectors through financial institutions held on a tight leash by the government.
Until recently, land was the single most valuable asset in societies around the globe. People who owned land could harvest its natural resources, such as precious metals, timber, and wild animals.
They could also use it to grow crops and raise domesticated animals. And it had enormous symbolic power. Kings, chiefs, and elected political leaders from Versailles to Monticello used their estates to signal status and project authority.
Property ownership was used in many societies to determine who could have a say in politics, either through voting or holding office.
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At the dawn of the 19th century, as a consequence of feudalism, tribalism, and colonisation, land ownership in most of the world was highly unequal.
In many countries, the wealthiest 5% of landowners owned 80 to 90% of the land. The bulk of rural inhabitants eked out a living working for large landowners, typically through servitude, or rented their land from large landowners at extortionate rates.
The only substantial groups that had avoided this fate were some indigenous populations and a small number of town dwellers dedicated to trade or a craft.
Over the following two centuries, land ownership drastically changed. First, population growth put unprecedented demand on access to land. Human beings spread out across continents, tilled over prairies, and felled forests.
Growing settler populations displaced indigenous populations at a massive scale and appropriated their lands. In many places, land became scarce.
Societies began land redistribution in response. In the 20th century, more than one-third of the world’s countries seized the holdings of large landowners and redistributed them to the landless or land poor.
One-and-a-half billion people directly benefited from such programmes, which continue to impact billions more.
Not every nation ended up like South Korea. Authoritarian leaders in nations such as Russia, China, Mexico, Cuba, and Zimbabwe used land reform programmes to destroy their domestic enemies—large landowners—and shore up rural political support. The same story played out in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, and in South America in the latter half of the 20th century.
The roots of contemporary underdevelopment and authoritarianism in many of these countries can be traced back to the political allocation of property and property rights that followed land reform.
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