Third, starting in 1953, large landholdings were broken up and redistributed to tenant farmers in what is dubbed as the "Land to the Tiller" reform.
[1][2] The Taiwanese government found land reform highly attractive due to the government's ideological origin: the founding father of the Republic of China Sun Yat-sen, who was influenced by Georgism, had proclaimed Equalization of Land Rights to be foundational to his political platform.
The land program succeeded also because the Kuomintang were mostly from Mainland China and so had few ties to the remaining indigenous landowners.
[3] The success of the reforms was also highly dependent on the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction or JCRR, an organization created by the U.S.'s China Aid Act of 1948.
[5] The Taiwanese land reform is largely considered to be successful; it yielded strong results in the improvement of life quality in rural Taiwan and facilitated Taiwan's transition from sharecropping based agriculture to landowner-farmer based agriculture.