Redistributing Power: Land Reform, Rural Cooptation, and Grassroots Regime Institutions in Authoritarian Taiwan

• Published date: 01 February 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241237457
• Author: Kevin Wei Luo
• Date: 01 February 2025

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2025, Vol. 58(2) 227–260

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140241237457

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Redistributing Power:

Land Reform, Rural

Cooptation, and

Grassroots Regime

Institutions in

Authoritarian Taiwan

Kevin Wei Luo

1



Abstract

Can redistributive policies such as land reform help authoritarian regimes

coopt rural societies? Given that land reform has the potential to disrupt

preexisting sociopolitical orders, this article highlights an unresolved puzzle of

how regimes balance between the objectives of expanding its rural coalitional

support through transformative redistribution and stabilizing its political

control over rural institutions during land reform. Using a novel dataset of

Taiwan’s 1950s rural reforms under the Kuomintang authoritarian regime, I

find that stronger redistributive effects facilitated cooptation of new land

reform beneficiaries through a key institution –the farmers’association (FA).

However, I also find that the restructuring of rank-and-file FA membership

was still subject to meddling by the native landlord class. I thus argue that land

reform, while allowing regimes to broaden their rural coalitions through

socioeconomic redistribution, can also paradoxically compel regimes to

concede power during institutional cooptation.

1

University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kevin Wei Luo, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 1209 Social

Sciences Building, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.

Email: kevinluo0906@gmail.com

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Keywords

Taiwan, land reform, cooptation, authoritarian regimes

Introduction

Can redistributive policies like land reform help authoritarian regimes to coopt

rural society? While there is a growing body of literature linking rural reform

or land redistribution with the politics of authoritarian rule (Albertus, 2015;

Albertus et al., 2016;Dower et al., 2018;Javed, 2022), I suggest that there is

an unresolved puzzle of how authoritarian cooptation can occur during so-

cially disruptive policy programs such as redistributive land reform. Osten-

sibly, rural redistribution enpowers regimes to buy support from formerly

disadvantaged tenant farmers, but does not automatically translate to regimes’

ability to institutional coopt rural forces. Furthermore, land reform also has the

potential to alienate former landlords or the traditional gentry class from the

regime –to the point of destabilizing the regime’s control over the coun-

tryside. Rural redistribution thus highlights a difficult tradeoff between the

disruptive expansion of the regime’s rural coalition through redistribution and

the stabilization of the regime’s rural political control.

However, regimes can seek a concessionary strategy to smooth over the

fallout of a spurned landed class, by tolerating landed elite participation in

regime institutions after land reform. While political leaders may find this

approach unsavory and in contradiction with the regime’s original goal to

politically empower underprivileged peasants through land reform, the need

to prevent rebellion threats can also force regimes to tolerate the continued

political influence of former landed elites under institiutional cooptation

(Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007). I thus argue that the potentially destabilizing

effects of land reform can unintentionally pave the way for the preservation of

landed power under authoritarian rule.

In order to answer the puzzle of how cooptation can occur under redis-

tribution despite these competing political objectives, this article draws from

two sets of critical rural reforms under the Kuomintang (KMT) party-regime

in Taiwan, namely its land-to-the-tiller campaign and the organizational re-

structuring of its Farmers’Associations (FAs), in the first two decades of KMT

rule on the island. Despite the historical idiosyncrasies of how the KMT came

to control Taiwan as a transplant regime after its 1949 exile from the Chinese

mainland, Taiwan’s rural reform can be seen as a typical case of authoritarian

redistribution, in which regime leaders insulated from oppositional pressures

at the national level can push through ambitious land reform programs to

garner widespread rural support (Albertus, 2015).

1

Yet in contrast to violent

grassroots campaigns of rural redistribution typically associated with, but not

limited to, those found under Communist regimes (Mo¨

ıse, 1983;Viola, 1999),

228 Comparative Political Studies 58(2)

Taiwan’s relatively bloodless ‘reform from above’is exemplary of a mod-

erated program of land redistribution facilitated through a state buy-back

scheme typically found under non-Communist regimes.

2

Toexamine the processes and effectsof rural reform in authoritarianTaiwan,

I present a novel dataset

3

documenting boththe results of the 1953 land-to-the-

tiller campaign and the subsequent Farmers’Associations restructuring pro-

grams. These two rural reform programs wereat the heart of the KMT regime’s

overall strategy to broaden its rural political coalition and stabilize its control

over grassroots political institutions. Leveraging data variation at the subna-

tional township level,I identify key metrics of the rural reform process, in-

cluding land expropriation outcomes, leadership continuity in the FA, and FA

membership reform, in order to assess the extent of rural redistribution and

institutionalcooptation under KMT rural reform.In other words, I aim to show

how well the KMTauthoritarian regime was able to successfully wrestle power

away from traditional elite forces in the Taiwanese countryside.

Through quantitative analysis and qualitative evidence from archival and

secondary sources, I find that the KMT’s initial political ambitions for rural

reform were likely undermined in two key aspects. First, while the KMT was

able to rely on land reform to reform FA organizational leadership and prevent

electoral challengers on a superficial level, it was unable to use this oppor-

tunity to successfully reform FA membership composition on a deeper level

and purge former landed elites completely out of the FAs. Second, native

Taiwanese elites at the local level were successful in challenging the regime’s

initial objectives of institutional design behind these rural reforms, leading to a

system of coexistence between the newly empowered ex-tenant farming class

and the entrenchedelite networks in rural Taiwan.

The rest of this article is divided into five sections. The first section reviews

the current literature on land reform under authoritarian regimes, and high-

lights the relatively unexplored puzzle of rural cooptation under land reform,

given land reform’s potential to disrupt authoritarian political orders. The

second section lays out the historical background behind both the land-to-the-

tiller and the FA restructuring campaign, and analyzes the KMT’s political

rationale for engaging in these reforms through qualitative archival evidence.

The third section introduces the main variables of interest and the coding

process of the dataset. The fourth section presents the main hypotheses,

statistical findings, and further robustness checks. The final section discusses

the implications of these findings, and demonstrates how the case of rural

reform under KMT rule in Taiwan can contribute to the study of redistribution

and cooptation under authoritarian regimes.

Luo 229