While closer to the peasants than were the Bolsheviks, Chinese revolutionaries did not treat them much better. During the agrarian reform, Chinese Communists on one hand gave peasants the land of the rich, whereas Russian peasants had themselves seized their masters’ property in 1917. On the other hand, they divided into hostile classes a rather homogenous rural society that used to stick together in respect to cities, thus making an agrarian reform into an agrarian revolution. Agrarian reform gave birth to innumerable, mostly non-viable, tiny farms, thus hastening the transition to the next steps. First collectivization, then the Great Leap Forward, took after the Soviet model, even though Mao claimed to correct the latter’s shortcomings. The process towards collectivization was nevertheless more progressive than that followed by the Soviet Union in 1930. True to its name, the Great Leap Forward (1958) claimed to “leap” from collectivization to communization within newly established People’s Communes. Far from amounting to sheer utopia, its strategy included quite a few pragmatic goals, such as a more fully employed rural manpower. Partly due to the means by which the regime functioned, the Great Leap was implemented in a chaotic, disastrous way, and resulted in one of the worst famines in human history. In order to cope with it, local, then regional authorities devised means that were to be enlarged and systematized after Mao’s death. Decollectivization eventually liquidated the socialist heritage during the early 1980s, enabling each peasant household to freely exploit the parcel of collective property entrusted to it.