Contractual disputes include three major issues: redemption of conditional sales, rent defaults, and evictions. Unlike water rights and boundary disputes, in which the issues were clear-cut and the juxtaposition of plots of land determined the proximate cause of the disputes between neighbors, contractual disputes were rooted in violations of written or oral agreements between individuals who may not have known each other personally. Boundary and water-rights disputes were age-old issues, but contractual disputes reveal the dynamics of the broader changes taking place in the rural economy during the eighteenth century. Contractual disputes were more closely related to the increasing competition to define and enforce property rights in land that characterized the eighteenth century. Furthermore, these were issues that had aroused the concern and drawn the attention of provincial-level officials who commented on them in their communications to the central government. In the case of redemptions of conditional sales and rent defaults, these also were issues that prompted several amendments of substatutes to the Qing law code, leading to the criminalization of rent defaults under some circumstances and restrictions on the right of redemption.

Redemption and Other Disputes over Land Sales (56 Cases)

The overwhelming majority of the disputes in this category were related to redemptions (huishu) of conditional sales (dianmai). Redemption refers to the right of the original owner of a plot of land to buy it back at the original sale price. Conditional sales were usually made for less than the full market value of the land, and the seller often remained on the land and paid rent to the buyer.