Follow-Up question: Were the Great Leap Forward and Four Pests Campaign disastrous?
Land reform is a big one, it's basically what won the CPC the Civil War, being able to organize peasants to overthrow their landlords which had been oppressing them for several millennia. You said non-war though, and while distributing land to peasants during peacetime is also very good at stimulating prosperity and growth, maybe it's better to ask what you mean by successful in peace time.
The First Five Year Plan was successful in seeing huge growth rates and development, but needed Soviet technicians and loans to see that level of industrialization. Mao was very much opposed to the centralized top-down economic model of the USSR, and, especially once Stalin died and many capitalist relations began to be restored in the USSR, there was a push for a decentralized and more democratic economic development, which is what the Great Leap was. It failed but the lessons learned in it were applied during the Cultural Revolution which, after a chaotic first few years of economic decline, once again saw growth in a decentralized manner.
Or maybe you mean less specific policies and more general ones? Overall there was an increased access to medicine for the Chinese population, although the rural regions wouldn't see medical staff in great numbers until the Great Leap and then again until the Cultural Revolution. But from 1949 to 1976 the life expectancy of China increased more than a year per year. Education also grew, but rural education mostly in the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution once again. Those periods were times when the party basically said "damn, we led the peasants to liberate China but haven't really liberated the peasants, and instead have become entrenched in the cities like every government before us, we need to change that", which is why many peasants look back on the Cultural Revolution fondly while the established urban intellectuals and party members who were purged for being rightists (such as Deng Xiaoping, who was purged more than once!) do not.
A good book is "The Unknown Cultural Revolution", by Dongping Han, who was a peasant in a village in Shandong province during that time. It talks about more than just the Cultural Revolution but why it happened and the context of the Chinese Revolution, etc. There are other titles as well as short essays.
Personally I find the period from 1949-1976 incredibly fascinating in that it is completely different from any other era in Chinese history, not even the Republican Kuomintang approached such a level of different governance from previous regimes in China's history.