[earlINmeyerkeg]

Chinese emperors have done this type of land reform innumerable times and it has always ended up in famine and disaster/regime change. Land consolidation became a thing (as it inevitably does) and baron landlords became commonplace as the consolidation of fields occurred. The positive aspect of land redistribution via the equal field system is that it alters the power structure for the corrupt landlords who should not have power and prevent progressive changes that benefit society. The negative aspect is it's borderline impossible to vet who is "worthy" of being a landlord. The Chinese unfortunately would let "laissez-faire" take over property control.

Eventually someone who knew how to get a leg up on others would take advantage of others financial incompetence, likely mortgage the property, then acquire it, eventually leading up to owning basically a whole province thus becoming basically creating their own landed title and domain. Then suddenly you've got a feudalistic system that has always existed, but the head government now may even have a worse problem they created themselves. It's happened when the south basically broke off after the final rebellion during the Tang dynasty. These landholders eventually had enough power and cultural difference that they could break from the north and retain full autonomy.

[cdavid]

Necessary but not sufficient and all that... In how Asia works, Studwell argued quite convincingly how land reforms in Japan, South Korea, etc. was a prelude to successful industrialization because it allowed creating financial surplus thanks to increase agricultural output across a significant part of the population.

And in China, it is well acknowledged that the reform from 1978 were a significant step toward China economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_Rural_Reform

[earlINmeyerkeg]

But like I said about how these wide sweeping reforms, they create instability and also famine. The reason it ended up being good (as your link also shows) was due to land consolidation. Millions of independent farmers does not create a food surplus as much as a few consolidated landmasses that can maximize production. As I stated, the consolidation inevitably occurs and always have in the many times China has performed land redistribution.

The primary reason the growth occurred was because of the land consolidation. Instead of having millions of independent farmers, they consolidated the land and only required hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on the land to maximize production. Thus allowing for a massive labor force that could be utilized for industrial production.