In 1947, during the Chinese Civil War, three years before the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong won the hearts of the Communist Party and the peasant class by introducing a new land reform. This land reform encouraged the mass murder of landlords and well-off peasants in order to redistribute the land to the peasant class and other landless workers. The idea of killing landlords was first outlined by Kang Sheng, expert in terror tactics, in 1947. The reform was an open door for violence when Mao insisted that the peasants themselves should do the killing. Landlords were tortured. They were dismembered, buried alive, strangled, shot, etc. There is no way to know exactly how many people were killed but the numbers range anywhere from one million to 28 million.