The Land Reform Movement was a mass movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China, which achieved land redistribution to the peasantry. Landlords had their land confiscated and they were subjected to mass killing by the CCP and former tenants, with the estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. The campaign resulted in hundreds of millions of peasants receiving a plot of land for the first time.

The July 7 Directive of 1946 set off eighteen months of fierce conflict in which all rich peasant and landlord property of all types was to be confiscated and redistributed to poor peasants. Party work teams went quickly from village to village and divided the population into landlords, rich, middle, poor, and landless peasants. Because the work teams did not involve villagers in the process, rich and middle peasants quickly returned to power.

Land reform was a decisive factor in the result of the Chinese Civil War. Millions of peasants who obtained land through the movement joined the People's Liberation Army or assisted in its logistical networks. According to Chun Lin, the success of land reform meant that at the founding of the PRC in 1949, China could credibly claim that for the first time since the late Qing period that it had succeeded in feeding one fifth of the world's population with only 7% of the world's cultivable land.

By 1953, land reform had been completed in mainland China with the exception of Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, and Sichuan. From 1953 onwards, the CCP began to implement the collective ownership of expropriated land through the creation of "Agricultural Production Cooperatives", transferring property rights of the seized land to the Chinese state. Farmers were compelled to join collective farms, which were grouped into People's communes with centrally controlled property rights.