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Rethinking Tenancy: Explaining Spatial and Temporal Variation in Late Imperial and Republican China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

John R. Shepherd
John R. Shepherd
Affiliation:
New York City
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Extract

Studies of the role of land tenure in the economic and social history of China are flawed by the unexamined assumption that the sale of land by impoverished farmers was the only process that generated high rates of tenancy and concentration of ownership of land. Debt-sales are assumed to occur as part of a cycle of immiserization in which a peasant population outgrows its landed resources and owner-farmers are forced to sell their lands and become the tenants or hired laborers of wealthy landlords. This essay demonstrates the improbability of such a scenario and establishes its opposite: that rates of tenancy and concentration of landownership rise, not in periods of economic decline but in periods of prosperity, and not through debt-sales but through the alternate processes of reclamation, migration, and changes in the mode of landlord farm management.

Type
Social Structure and the Economics of Agriculture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 1988 , pp. 403 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1988

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