Land reform in the context of "Land ownership"

Redistribution of income and wealth is the transfer of income and wealth (including physical property) from some individuals to others through a social mechanism such as taxation, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confiscation, divorce or tort law. The term typically refers to redistribution on an economy-wide basis rather than between selected individuals.

Understanding of the phrase varies, depending on personal perspectives, political ideologies and the selective use of statistics. It is frequently used in politics, to refer to perceived redistribution from those who have more to those who have less. Rarely, the term is used to describe laws or policies that cause redistribution in the opposite direction, from the poor to the rich.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR; Russian: Па́ртия социали́стов-революционе́ров, romanized: Pártiya sotsialístov-revolyutsionérov,, lit. 'Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries') was a major socialist political party in the late Russian Empire, during both phases of the Russian Revolution, and in early Soviet Russia. The party members were known as Esers (эсеры, esery, from "SRs").

The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants. The SRs boycotted the elections to the First Duma following the Revolution of 1905 alongside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but chose to run in the elections to the Second Duma and received the majority of the few seats allotted to the peasantry. Following the 1907 coup, the SRs boycotted all subsequent Dumas until the fall of the Tsar in the February Revolution of March 1917. Controversially, the party leadership endorsed the Russian Provisional Government and participated in multiple coalitions with liberal and social-democratic parties, while a radical faction within the SRs rejected the Provisional Government's authority in favor of the Congress of Soviets and began to drift towards the Bolsheviks. These divisions would ultimately result in the party splitting over the course of the fall of 1917, with the emergence of a separate Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Meanwhile, Alexander Kerensky, one of the leaders of the February Revolution and the second and last head of the Provisional Government (July–November 1917) was a nominal member of the SR party but in practice acted independently of its decisions.

Before the 1910 Mexican Revolution, most land in post-independence Mexico was owned by wealthy Mexicans and foreigners, with small holders and indigenous communities possessing little productive land. During the colonial era, the Spanish crown protected holdings of indigenous communities that were mostly engaged in subsistence agriculture to countervail the encomienda and repartimiento systems. In the 19th century, Mexican elites consolidated large landed estates (haciendas) in many parts of the country while small holders, many of whom were mixed-race mestizos, engaged with the commercial economy.

After the War of Independence, Mexican liberals sought to modernize the economy, promoting commercial agriculture through the dissolution of common lands, most of which were then property of the Catholic Church, and indigenous communities. When liberals came to power in the mid nineteenth century, they implemented laws that mandated the breakup and sale of these corporate lands. When liberal general Porfirio Díaz took office in 1877, he embarked on a more sweeping program of modernization and economic development. His land policies sought to attract foreign investment to Mexican mining, agriculture, and ranching, resulting in Mexican and foreign investors controlling the majority of Mexican territory by the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Peasant mobilization against landed elites during the revolution prompted land reform in the post-revolutionary period and led to the creation of the ejido system, enshrined in the Mexican Constitution of 1917.

A 99-year lease, under historic English law, since widely received abroad, was traditionally seen as the longest practical term of a lease of real property without it being considered perpetual. While it is no longer a hard legal limit in most common law jurisdictions today, 99-year leases continue to be common as a matter of business practice. In some countries (such as Singapore) land reform legislation has resulted in most or all land being owned by the state and leased to users, which often takes the form of a 99-year lease. In this case, the lease is often transferable and treated as essentially equivalent to ownership, at least to the extent that it is the main way in which one may purchase the more or less permanent use of land.

Property scholars describe leasing as a "widespread and highly successful" institutional form that allocates control and risk differently from ownership. Governments have also used 99-year leases for strategic purposes, including the 1940 U.S.–U.K. Destroyers for Bases agreements granting rent free 99-year base rights.

The Bhoodan movement (Land Gift movement), also known as the Bloodless Revolution, was a voluntary land reform movement in India. It was initiated by Gandhian Vinoba Bhave in 1951 at Pochampally village, Pochampally.

The Bhoodan movement attempted to persuade wealthy landowners to voluntarily give a percentage of their land to landless people. Bhave drew philosophical inspiration from the Sarvodaya movement and Gram Swarajya.

The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a mass movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War and in the early People's Republic of China, which achieved land redistribution to the peasantry. Landlords – whose status was theoretically defined through the percentage of income derived from exploitation as opposed to labor – 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.

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.

The post-revolution Egyptian land reform was an effort to change land ownership practices in Egypt following the 1952 Revolution launched by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers Movement.

Elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly were held on 25 November 1917. Organized as a result of events in the February Revolution, the elections took place two months after they had been originally meant to occur. They are generally recognised as the first free elections in Russian history, though they did not produce a democratically elected government, as the Bolsheviks subsequently disbanded the Constituent Assembly and proceeded to rule the country as a one-party state with all opposition parties banned.

Various academic studies have given alternative results. However, all indicate that the Bolsheviks were clear winners in the urban centres, and also took around two-thirds of the votes of soldiers on the Western Front. Nevertheless, the Socialist-Revolutionary party topped the polls, winning a plurality of seats (no party won a majority) on the strength of support from the country's rural peasantry, who were for the most part one-issue voters, that issue being land reform.