Land use in Laeral

Land use in Laeral refers to the history and practices of the use of land by humans in Laeral. This encompasses periods of Rén Laeralite land tenure, land appropriation by Arrivée settlers during the colonial and First Allied Provinces periods, land reform during Laeral's Republican Era, and increased urbanization and agricultural consolidation from the mid-20th century to the modern day. Land use has impacts on economic outcomes and social and political development, and scholars have used the history of land use in Laeral to explore topics ranging from political affiliation to race relations.

History

This section is excerpted from Noël Lavoie-Zhao's chapter "Land Use in Laeral: An Introduction", in the academic anthology Pure Earth, Dirty Hands: Contrasting Narratives of Dispossession, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Laeralian Land Tenure (Salaun University Press, 2014). Since 2010, Dr. Lavoie-Zhao has been the Anatole Marchand Professor of History at Althea City University.

Colonial Era

An anti-slavery engraving depicting dozens of enslaved people being forcibly brought to a plantation in Laeral's Riverlands region, circa 1830. The central figure, being manhandled by an overseer, recalls his family's farewell.

During the colonial era, determining possession of agricultural land, particularly in the fertile Eastern Riverlands, Althea, and the Beuvron River Valley, was a central function of government. After the 1807 DeBarre Line was created, marking off the initial bounds of Arrivée settlement, land west of the line was declared property of the ducal government to apportion as it saw fit. Mass land auctions throughout the early 1800s saw gentlemen speculators as the chief beneficiaries. The most fertile land, often irrigated by centuries-old channels and the site of continuous farming for millennia, was parceled into large plantation domains owned by individual highborn households, operated for profit through the production of wheat, tobacco, rice, indigo, tea, or other crops. Laws against "squatting" and "vagrancy," leveled against Rén families who sought to remain on their land, carried the sentence of compulsory service as agricultural laborers on the local plantation. The penalty for taking up arms against the state was also often serfdom, often for entire villages or regions, and so by 1845, the dawn of the Laeralian War of Independence, an estimated 900,000 Rén and Metice people were enslaved on plantations. Slavery in the colonial Laeralian context, however, was not an inherited status, although it was a racialized one: those born to enslaved laborers were born free, but Arrivée were never enslaved.

Perhaps 60% of land area—primarily that which had been cleared and was suitable for large-scale agriculture—was parcelled out between plantations. Much of the remaining land, particularly that which was less hospitable for farming, was owned by small farmers, Rén, Arrivée, and Metice alike. Villages served as a site for cross-racial social interactions: marketplaces, smiths, inns, and the like fostered growing linguistic and cultural exchange. This included the emergence of Laeralian Creole, a polyglot mixture of French and Mandarin which would persist among the largely illiterate population until the standardization of language in the Republican era. The taboo against miscegenation was also transgressed more often at the village level, particularly between transient laborers who had migrated away from the growing expanse of plantation land. It was these villages which were rightfully called, if not the cradle of the war of independence, at least its nursery.

Corvée forced laborers in the Xianhai peninsula clearing a road in the aftermath of a landslide.

For free and enslaved Rén alike, the chief interaction with the colonial state was through corvée, forced state labor for a period of one month each year. Instituted as a means of conducting labor-intensive infrastructure upkeep and construction, corvée occurred on a rotating basis based on birth month, so as to minimize disruption to the harvest; for this reason, the colonial state's register of births are a treasure trove for modern historians and genealogists. The construction of roads was a constant preoccupation of the colonial state, seeing as they were essential for transport of goods and movement of soldiers outside of the navigable waterways (the few railroads built in Laeral during the colonial era, totaling less than 120 kilometers, were built exclusively with Arrivée labor). Typical corvée duties included excavating roads after flooding and mudslides, paving roads, and breaking ground for new roads, although in certain locales corvée labor also built government buildings and waystations. Corvée labor was widely despised: it was backbreaking, all-day work for which any rural Rén man between the ages of 15 and 35 would typically be relocated to a work camp and separated from their families for a four week period annually. Payment was nominal and conditions at work camps poor, with strict discipline enforced at the end of a whip or truncheon.

Cities, chief among them Althea, St. Clair, Marist, and Lyrene, offered the greatest opportunities for social mobility. Going to sea or joining a fisherman's crew was one avenue of escape: on the open seas, few cared the complexion of a man's skin as long as his arms were suited for hauling nets or whaling. The cities saw the emergence of the Laeralian middle class, typically merchants or artisans producing goods for consumption by the nobility. The ducal court was well known for its patronage of the arts and its fondness for fine cuisine, while the seasonal migration between Althea and Marist established by Duke Armand meant that thriving artisan communities sprung up in both cities. Factories were established in limited numbers in urban centers (with the exception of Althea, where strict urban beautification regulations forestalled the erection of smokestacks), including textile mills and brick and steel foundries, typically with the patronage of an interested consortium or individual member of the nobility. Migrants from surrounding rural areas were often the only ones willing to accept factories' beastly conditions; the phenomenon of rural migration to the city spurred the creation of Rén fraternal organizations and women's support circles as well as the first labor unions, inspired by examples from abroad. Regardless, by 1848 industrialization had touched the lives of only a bare amount of the Laeralian people. The majority of the population would remain rural and impoverished, as peasant freeholders, sharecroppers, slaves, or migrant workers, until well after the War of Independence.

First Allied Provinces

The Laeralian War of Independence would upset patterns of land use in the ruralities. The plantation estates had been the sight of great bloodshed during the war, as the formerly enslaved took vengeance on their captors, and the vast majority of the Arrivée nobility had fled northward to what would become the rump state of High Fells. On some plantations, the Rén enslaved workforce had taken up subsistence farming, while other estates lay fallow for lack of hands to cultivate them. Military pronouncements during the war, such as General G. E. Lematre's Field Order 18, had established a precedent that land tenants and the formerly enslaved were to be permitted to stay on this land.

This precedent, however, was not followed by the revolutionary government following the war. Faced with an inability to print enough money to provide back pay to soldiers of the Free Army, many of whom had withstood months of delayed pay, the provisional government's Act No. 14 ("A law on landholdings and tenancy") ordered plantation land seized, appraised, and turned over to Free Army veterans in lieu of cash payments. For most veterans, the choice was simple: between cash payments in the rapidly-depreciating Laeralian mark or a tract of land of proven productivity, most Free Army men took the opportunity to achieve land ownership. Based on name analysis, an estimated 30% of the roughly 28,000 Free Army veterans who received land were Rén.

Arrivée sharecroppers harvesting wheat under supervision, in an 1857 painting by Auguste de Lemartine, famed for his depictions of agrarian life.

This act of land redistribution transformed Laeralian society by massively enlarging the class of economically self-sufficient peasantry. The newly created landed peasantry, nearly all eligible to vote under franchise restrictions of the time, were a powerful interest group lauded in popular culture and political writings as the backbone of the nation. The rosy image of a nation of salt-of-the-earth independent farmers, however, was deeply flawed. The landed farmer class was never more than a large minority of Laeralites; the majority of peasants remained sharecroppers for these landed farmers or squatters on undesirable land, farming continually for survival.

As immigration and natural population growth swelled the population to over 10 million Laeralites, competition for land pushed Laeral's boundaries westward. At this juncture, it's appropriate to consider the nature of the Laeralian frontier during the 1860s and 70s.

During the colonial era, the DeBarre Line, seen on maps at slightly west of the Beuvron River, had defined the theoretical westward borders of government control. The line had been proclaimed during the reign of Duke Armand, and shaped patterns of population settlement despite existing only on paper. Through a series of treaties with the squabbling Minjian kingdoms and satrapies west of the line, the colonial government in Althea maintained relative peace on the frontier. However, following independence, Laeralian public opinion massively favored the legalization of westward expansion, rooted in mythicized and anti-Minjian conceptions of the frontier as a land of rich agricultural land suffering under weak and brutish rule.

Provincial militias hoping to secure territory advanced westward, carrying out a mission termed by historians as "subnational colonialism" — provincial militias, backed by the provincial government and the backing of provincial elites, seized territory by force of arms in brief campaigns often lasting only weeks, only to subsequently seek their fait accompli recognized by the national government. These feats of territorial acquisition sparked a lucrative industry in adventurers, both Laeralian and foreign-born, traveling from province to province offering their services to provincial governments in lucrative territorial-acquisition operations. By and large, these expeditions were successful in sparking short and victorious conflicts, with rare exceptions where canny Rén leaders took advantage of Laeralian overconfidence to defeat provincial militia forces and secure the status quo ante bellum.

The Vespasienate

These frontier wars or petites guerres, and accompanying westward expansion, were a central factor in national politics during the late 19th century. Politics increasingly took on a sectional character, as eastern mercantile interests favored frontier stability so as to foster lucrative trade with the Rén kingdoms, while westerners and the working class largely favored continued expansion so as to secure land ownership on the frontier. The relative stalemate between the two factions, with neither side able to achieve national ascendancy due to the weakness of the national government, would end with the War of the Seven Provinces (1875-1877), where the provincial militias accomplished in colonial warfare with the benefits of organizational and technological superiority floundered against a unified, well-disciplined, and modern foe in Libertas Omnium Maximus.

Defeat in the war led to the ascension of Vespasien Jamet, central figure in the politics of the First Allied Provinces. During his nearly thirty-year (1880-1909) tenure in politics, known to historians as the Vespasienate, Jamet as prime minister oversaw a strengthening of the central government, including an expansion of taxation authority and the nation's first standing army; his opponents fruitlessly branded him "Emperor Vespasien I". A strongman who emerged from and represented the rural wealthy landowning class, Jamet's military and administrative reforms were in large part dedicated to carrying out westward Arrivée settlement and the broader settler-colonial project. In an audacious war against the Zhao kingdom in 1885, Laeralian troops seized the ancient Minjian capital of Miaoshi and annexed the kingdom's territory in its entirety, the largest-yet acquisition of land.

The first step in carving up land was surveying it, a process which relied in part on translating and updating Zhao kingdom taxation maps and in part on the efforts of surveying crews like this one pictured here in Nanhai province.

The status of these new conquests were addressed under the landmark Land Tenure Act of 1888, enacted under Jamet's premiership. This law would, in one swift maneuver, increase the territory of the Laeralian state by nearly one-third while laying the groundwork for the wealthy Arrivée farmer class to expand its dominance across the eastern Riverlands. The Riverlands provinces of Neidong, Enara, Nanhai, Meilun, and Jinhua were created as the first Rén-majority provinces since Laeralian independence; Neidong and Enara had languished for years as nonvoting territories, while the other three new provinces were newly seized from the defunct Zhao kingdom. Agricultural land in these colonies was slated for Arrivée settlement through a new schema by which all rural land would be classified as either "settler" or "reserve" territory. Settler territory, encompassing over 70% of land in these five provinces and drawn to include the richest agricultural land, was reserved for Arrivée commercial farming through land auctions run by the government. The remainder, "reserve" territory for the region's Rén inhabitants, was undesirable, either through distance from road or river arteries, steep slopes, or swampland. Through this formula, which would be replicated in other territories coming under Laeralsford's sway, the dominion of the Arrivée landowner class was preserved and expanded. Other portions of Zhao territory, meanwhile, were left entirely for their Rén inhabitants, yet had no realistic path to provincehood and were instead governed by appointed territorial officials.

Some voices within Laeralian society, such as the growing quasi-socialist cooperative movement, called for the newly-acquired land to be governed in collective fashion, approximating the collective farms which were widely understood to have been predominant among the Zhao kingdom. (Collective farming was in actuality a method of land tenure which the Zhao kingdom was transitioning away from at the time of the Laeral-Zhao War; the Laeralian cooperative movement somewhat-inaccurately perceived collective farming as the sole method of Rén land tenure since time immemorial, which was false). For the cooperativists, collective farming was a method of ensuring social harmony and economic resiliency for Laeral's poor, and they decried Prime Minister Jamet's choice to split the conquered territories into tracts of land for individual farmers. The cooperativist movement endured throughout the early 20th century, with its proponents establishing several communes during the late First Allied Provinces era, to varying degrees of success. Nouvelle-Concorde in Jinhua province, which attracted several thousand residents and experimented with collective marriage and child-rearing before its collapse following the Laeralian Revolution, is the most well-known of these.

The land lottery in Meilun takes place at the provincial capitol, with a crowd of onlookers awaiting the results.

How did land allocation play out on the ground during the Vespasienate? In settler land, newly-constituted provincial governments carried out lotteries for small tracts of land in a populist maneuver; entrance to the lotteries was open to all men regardless of race, with separate lotteries carried out for single and married men. Ticket-holders were guaranteed to be deeded a tract of land, albeit one that could vary in size from as little as 8 hectares to nearly 30 hectares in area, for a registration fee equivalent to roughly two months' wages for a typical workman—in other words, on the very edge of affordability for Laeral's working class. The opportunity for sharecroppers and the urban poor to obtain title to land, and thus, the promise of economic self-sufficiency, was rightfully viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In fact, marriage rates rose sharply in the months before the land lotteries, suggesting that the opportunity to enter in the married men's lottery for larger plots of land was sufficiently enticing to shift personal behavior.

Even as more and more family farmers were forced to sell their land to larger landowners, romanticized depictions of Arrivée peasant life, such as this painting by Auguste de Lemartine imitator Rudolphe Just, were continually popular.

Arrivée and Metice people were the greatest beneficiaries of the land lottery, although some Rén were able to afford the registration fee and benefit as well. All those who registered for the lottery received land, although it varied widely in productivity and suitability for farming; common crops included wheat, barley, and rice, as well as various vegetables. Although some small farmers were able to become well-established, particularly those who benefited from agricultural experience and received fertile agricultural land, many would-be farmers found themselves unable to make these tracts of land economically viable, particularly the urban poor with limited experience in farming. By 1898, ten years after the passage of the Land Tenure Act, it was estimated that over half of settler farmers who had benefitted from the land lottery had been forced to sell their property to larger farmers, particularly after poor growing conditions in 1893 forced many small farmers to abandon their lands. These tracts of land were largely absorbed by larger landowners who reestablished sharecropping, often harvesting profitable cash crops instead. Thus, despite the populist promise of the Land Tenure Act that it would expand the class of independent small farmers, it largely instead produced the expansion of the wealthy plantation-farmer class, which held tremendous political influence under Vespasian Jamet's corrupt political order.

The impact of the Land Tenure Act's legalized land theft within the provinces subjected to it is difficult to overstate. In the five Riverlands provinces established under the act (sometimes known as the MENNJ provinces in the parlance of civil servants, from the abbreviations of the provinces involved), virtually all Arrivée settlers were made complicit in land theft and the expulsion of Rén inhabitants from their homes. In some cases, these settlers lived in the houses and cottages of the natives they had evicted, with children at play and farmers at work routinely unearthing trinkets, grave sites, or even hastily-abandoned foodstuffs buried in shallow earth in preparation for consumption, such as preserved eggs. Soldiers of the Laeralian Army—recently reorganized and dramatically expanded under the Vespasianate to largely supplant the provincial militias—were used to evict Rén inhabitants and quell the scattered outbreaks of resistance. The consequent forced migration of Rén to "reserve" territory led to widespread poverty, as many were left destitute by being forced from their land. These reserve territories were among the poorest areas of the country, jump-starting Rén migration to Riverlands cities such as Hanshui, Lushui, Gaolan, and Laeralsford in a process known as the First Great Migration. These cities grew rapidly in size during the last decades of the 19th century, seeing the birth of the initial incarnation of the paramilitary Rén Self-Defense League.

The endemic overcrowding in Rén reserve areas is illustrated by this gathering in Enara province, as onlookers arrive to see an itinerant Minjian priest at the local temple. Note the mix of traditional garments and Arrivée-style headwear.

During the Laeralian Revolution three decades hence, the Rén reserve areas in Riverlands provinces, overcrowded and full of young people with few economic prospects, would be among the earliest to flock to the banner of René Gramont and the Army for Democracy and Progress. Land expropriation left scars in the provinces' social fabrics as well: provinces that were the site of forced relocation saw correspondingly greater racial tensions throughout the 20th century, including greater violence during and after the Revolution and other periods of social unrest, as well as economic consequences such as greater poverty and wealth inequality. To this day, the decennial census reveals that the rural areas of the MENNJ provinces are among the most racially-segregated in Laeral. In the last days of the Vespasienate, subsequent Land Tenure Acts in 1907 and 1909 brought the regime of land expropriation and Rén reserve territories to Minsheng, Minzu, and Jianguo as well.

Revolutionaries and Republicans

Every modern history textbook from primary school onwards centers land distribution at the heart of the Laeralian Revolution. This is a fact which was well understood at the time as well, with the Republican movement harnessing land-based grievances to fill the ranks of the revolutionary armies. Those who took up arms motivated by land—primarily, but not exclusively, Rén in the Laeralian West—would in turn make demands for land reform on the post-revolution regime.

The death of Vespasien Jamet and the ascendancy of his successor Augustin Brienne as head of what historian Christophe Millet calls the "landowner's regime" in 1909 saw no change to the ongoing process of land expropriation in the west, as Brienne—himself Choisel province's largest landowner—signaled his intention to continue favoring plantation interests as the glue which held his coalition together. The First Fellsian War, which erupted in 1911 and raged until 1916, was in fact a reprieve for Laeral's peasantry. The needs of the nation's war machine spurred the rapid growth of industry, primarily in the Riverlands, which accelerated the existing trend of Rén migration from overcrowded "reserve territories" to cities. The plantation-owning class suffered a rare rebuke at the hands of the national government during the war, as landowners' protests that conscription and the growth of factories were depriving their farms of necessary laborers were disregarded; even the Laeralian Parliament, traditionally the domain of the landowning class, voted down an attempt backed by agrarian interests to exempt farm laborers from the draft. With such a labor shortage, women in some cases took on farming duties, particularly in families whose patriarchs had been dispatched to the front or had moved to the city for work.

The end of the war in 1916, however, meant intensified pressures on Laeral's agrarian workers, tenant farmers and smallholders alike. Not only did the postwar economic crisis raise the costs of agricultural inputs and nearly all consumer goods, but peasants renting their land found their rents raised by large landowners seeking to recoup their wartime losses. To add insult to injury, biased laws on farmland deemed "abandoned" meant that the families of men who had been killed during the war soon found themselves challenged to prove their legal title to the land they farmed or find it confiscated and sold at auction. Even prior to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1918, standoffs and shootouts between veterans and provincial constables over the confiscation of "abandoned" farmland signaled the increased violence around land affairs.

Although the Laeralian Revolution began with an urban uprising in the city of Gaolan, where laborers who were largely migrants from the countryside went on strike over rising food prices, rural demands for land distribution quickly took center stage. At the onset of the widespread uprising, the Committee for Democracy and Progress, led by René Gramont, drafted the Renfeng Platform as its statement of principles. The Committee's plans for land reform were spelled out in detail in the Renfeng Platform, including the return of confiscated property since the war, an end to labor abuses on plantations, and land redistribution accompanied by a legal limit on the size of one landowner's holdings. The National Revolutionary Directorate, another revolutionary organization prominent in eastern Laeral, similarly pledged to support land reform and a cap on landholding acreage, albeit in less detail than the Renfeng Platform. The Republicans' widely-publicized pledges for land reform were the driving factor for many Laeralites to join the revolutionary forces, and featured prominently in propaganda messaging.

Amidst the bloodshed and disruption of the conflict, experiments in land reform were widely carried out at the local level. In many Rén-majority villages in western Laeral, the flight of Arrivée landowners meant that their lands were farmed collectively. Land was in many cases the driving spark of revolutionary violence—as word of the uprising spread, many villagers drove away or executed hated local landlords and divided their lands or farmed them collectively. In the Xianhai peninsula, the agrarian-socialist Xianhai Peasants' Front embraced the collectivization of agrarian land, while even in Loyalist strongholds such as the territory governed by the Loiraine Clique, the newly-impoverished refugees fleeing the advance of Republican forces were granted some amounts of agrarian land redistributed from the wealthy by government order.

With the Republican victory in the Revolution, newly-appointed President Gramont chose to accept the facts on the ground and give government endorsement to the transfers in land ownership which had already taken place during the Revolution, against the wishes of liberals in the Committee for Democracy and Progress. The landmark Land Reform Act of 1923 signaled acceptance of forced transfers in land ownership which had taken place during the war, while declaring that all property belonging to landowners who had fled abroad or served as army officers in Loyalist forces as of the end of hostilities would be seized by the government. The new National Rural Reconstruction Administration (NRRA) was given immense power to administer and divide government-owned land, issue titles formalizing ownership of new lands, and arbitrate land disputes, of which there were many.

In western Laeral, where vicious guerrilla fighting had driven out virtually all Arrivée settlers, Arrivée-held land had largely been already redistributed by the end of the war in 1921. This redistribution was legitimized by the Land Reform Act, which also benefitted traditional methods of collective land ownership prominent in Zhao Country by giving traditional collective land ownership legal weight without formal documentation. The picture in the rest of the country was comparatively much more challenging, as many Arrivée families had remained on their land rather then fleeing, necessitating a thornier process of forced expropriation. The MENNJ provinces presented particular challenges, as the scale of inequity in landholdings was the greatest: the largest decile of landholdings in the MENNJ provinces comprised 71% of agrarian land, compared to only 47% in the eastern Riverlands, 61% in Xianhai, and 39% in southeastern Laeral.

Examiners of the National Rural Reconstruction Administration during a fact-finding mission to Gaolan in 1938

As it was charged with under law, the National Rural Reconstruction Administration opened avenues for petitioners to request redress for land stolen within 60 years of the law's enactment: January 1, 1863. Examiners fanned out across the country to hear these claims, with broad authority to redistribute land at their will belonging to any property of over 100 hectares. Initially, formal, legal-style hearings were used to determine the validity of a claim, but the immense number of claims to be adjudicated meant that examiners soon resorted to traditional methods of dispute reconciliation, in large part driven by local elders.

Cases of land redistribution were often complex. The acclaimed 1957 Laeralian play The Judgment of Fontenay, although fictional, depicts one of these cases: a 180-hectare plantation in rural Therese province, owned by an elderly widow, is faced with demands for redistribution by sharecroppers, who allege deception and land theft by the widow's now-deceased father over 50 years before. The widow proclaims that the plantation was purchased legitimately, and the deed of sale was destroyed by fire during the Revolution. The politics of the situation are unclear: petitioner and defendant alike are Metice, while the widow's son fought bravely for Republican forces during the Revolution and the sharecroppers include those who joined the militia fighting against the Revolution. Who gains land, and how much? These were the sort of dilemmas assailing NRRA examiners on a daily basis. Open-and-shut cases of wealthy landowners who had fled the country or become officers for the Loyalists and thus forfeited their land were decidedly the minority.

With the potential for vast financial gain hinging on examiners' decisions, it's remarkable that the process was, by and large, carried our fairly. Attempts at intimidation and bribery of examiners were frequent, but examiners, many of whom had been civil servants prior to the Revolution, by and large were more respectful of the status quo than many had expected, often siding with defendants when theft could not be clearly proven. As a result of examiners' respect for due process and the backlog of cases, the land redistribution process proceeded slowly during the 1920s, particularly in the MENNJ provinces and Xianhai where land inequities were most severe.

Land reform, of course, did not solely consist of shifts in ownership. The 1924 Agrarian Rent Reduction Act gave protections to tenant farmers, primarily by capping rent for agrarian land at 30% of annual yield and strictly limiting year-to-year rises. Prior to this reform, landowners often charged tenant farmers high rents of 40 or 50% of crops harvested, exacerbating rural poverty. The government was also granted the power to void all agrarian rent in the event of natural disaster, and tenant farmers were granted legal protections from eviction.

The slower-than-expected pace of land redistribution under the Land Reform Act of 1923 led to the third and final major land law of Gramont's tenure: the 1928 Land to the Tiller Act. This was the long-promised land cap of the Renfeng Platform, intended to finally transition the Laeralian rural public from tenant farming to land ownership. It ordered the expropriation of all private landholdings of over 40 hectares, which were then administered by the NRRA to be redistributed to the landless or land-deprived. The 40 hectare cap was the subject of great controversy—radicals lobbied for a cap of only 6 to 8 hectares, but concerns over food shortages and the fear of eliminating economies of scale led the government to decide on its 40 hectare limit.

These three reforms jointly set the stage for a transformation of rural Laeralian society. The proportion of rural tenant farmers fell sharply, from perhaps three-quarters of peasants prior to the Revolution to only around 30% by 1935. With rural land ownership came decreased rural poverty, with minimal corresponding drops in output, although here the effects of land redistribution are difficult to extricate from the effects of agrarian innovations promoted by the government through organizations such as the Rural Agricultural Service. Land redistribution was only the first of a series of transformations impacting rural life during the Republican era, as the rural aspect of the social revolution branded as the Rose Revolution. The typical peasant living through the 1920s and 30s would have witnessed concerted changes instituted from above in every field from women's rights to education and literacy to the creation of a race-blind national identity, but by far the most impactful in his or her everyday life would have been land ownership. It is for this reason that, on visits to rural regions of the country, both President Gramont and Hong Kuo-shu, Director of the National Rural Reconstruction Administration, regularly found themselves greeted by genuine, cheering crowds.