Historian Walter Scheidel writes that the violence of the land reform campaign had a significant impact on economic inequality.
He gives as an example the village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton's book Fanshen: 
In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled.
All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether.
As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.

By 1958 private ownership was entirely abolished and households all over China were organized into state-operated communes.
Chinese leadership required that the communes must produce more grain for the cities and earn foreign exchange from exports.
These reforms were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they "voluntarily" agreed to join the collective.
Historian Walter Scheidel writes that the violence of the land reform campaign had a significant impact on economic inequality. He gives as an example the village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton's book Fanshen: 
In Zhangzhuangcun, in the more thoroughly reformed north of the country, most "landlords" and "rich peasants" had lost all their land and often their lives or had fled. All formerly landless workers had received land, which eliminated this category altogether. As a result, "middling peasants," who now accounted for 90 percent of the village population, owned 90.8 percent of the land, as close to perfect equality as one could possibly hope for.
By 1958 private ownership was entirely abolished and households all over China were organized into state-operated communes. Chinese leadership required that the communes must produce more grain for the cities and earn foreign exchange from exports. These reforms were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they "voluntarily" agreed to join the collective.
Chinese Land Reform