An earlier version ofthis article was presented as a paper to the India–China seminar at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. I am grateful to the participants in that seminar, especially Roderick McFarquhar, Peter Perdue, Hue Tam Tai, Benjamin Schwartz and David Washhrook for their comments. I would like to thank my colleague Lynda Shaffer for cheerfully supplying me with numerous books and articles on Chinese history. I take responsibility for all those points on which the above have failed to rectify wrong-headedness on my part and for any errors that might have remained.

¹ The full story of the Chinese famine during the Great Leap Forward of 1959–61 only emerged in the late 1970s. Estimates of excess mortality during this famine have ranged between 16 million and 29.5 million. See Ansley, J. Cole, ‘Population Trends, Population Policy and Population Studies in China’ in Population and Development Review 7 (1981)Google Scholar, and B. Ashton, K. Hill, A. Piazza and R. Zeitz, ‘Famine in China: 1958–1961’ in ibid. 10 (1984).

² Moore, J. Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966);Google Scholar laments, explicit and implicit, about the lack of an Indian peasant revolution analogous to the Chinese owing to the betrayals of the Indian bourgeois leadership can be found in the contributions of G. Pandey and others in Guha, Ranajit (ed.), Subaltern Studies I (Delhi, 1981).Google Scholar

³ Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar

⁴ Eastman, Lloyd, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford, 1984), p. 68.Google Scholar

⁵ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 55.Google Scholar

⁶ Long, Ngo Vinh, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (Boston, 1973), pp. 233–8.Google Scholar

⁷ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, pp. 196–202;Google ScholarGreenough, Paul, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: the Famine of 1943–44 (New York, 1982), pp. 299–309.Google Scholar

⁸ Eastman in Fairbank, John K. and Feuerwefker, Albert (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13, Republican China 1912–1949, Part 2 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 606;Google Scholar Eastman had suggested in an earlier study following Theodore White that ‘in March of 1943 … about five million human beings [in Honan] were “dead or dying” ’. See Eastman, Seeds of Destruction, p. 68.

⁹ Khanh, Huynh Kim, Vietnamese Communism 1925–1945 (Ithaca, 1986), p. 301.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 76.Google Scholar

¹¹ Eastman, , Seeds of Destruction, p. 67;Google ScholarCambridge History of China, 13, 2, p. 605.Google Scholar

¹² Young, Arthur, China's Wartime Finance and Inflation 1937–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Eastman, , Seeds of Destruction, p. 68.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Bose, Sugata, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 88.Google Scholar

¹⁵ ‘Missionary tells of China's Plight’, The New York Times, 18 11. 1942.Google Scholar

¹⁶ On India, see Bose, Agrarian Bengal and Baker, C. J., An Indian Rural Economy: the Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar On Vietnam, see Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976).Google Scholar The impact of the 1930s depression on agrarian relations in China has not been the subject of comparable studies but there is a mass of contemporary evidence in Institute of Pacific Relations, Agrarian China: Selected Source Materials from Chinese Authors (Shanghai, 1938, Arlington, Virginia, 1976).Google Scholar

¹⁷ This is argued persuasively in Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 264.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The classic exposition of a ‘middle peasant’ thesis is to be found in Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969);Google Scholar see also Alavi, Hamza, ‘Peasants and Revolution’ in Gough, Kathleen and Sharma, Hari P. (eds), Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Scott, , Moral Economy.Google Scholar

²⁰ Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 927.Google Scholar

²¹ For a more elaborate exposition of this typology see Bose, Agrarian Bengal, ch. 1.Google Scholar

²² Scott, , Moral Economy, p. 81.Google Scholar

²³ Ibid., p. 79; see also Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975), pp. 278–333.

²⁴ Scott, , Moral Economy, p. 78.Google Scholar

²⁵ See Bose, Agrarian Bengal.Google Scholar

²⁶ Huang, Philip, Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China, pp. 29–32.Google Scholar

²⁷ Institute of Pacific Relations, Agrarian China, p. 3. The precise definitions of the various categories are not made explicit in this article entitled ‘Land Ownership and its Concentration in China’. It does show, however, that the degree of land concentration was greater in south China than in the north, p. 4.Google Scholar

²⁸ On copper coinage see ‘Chinese Copper Currency and the Peasantry’ in ibid., pp. 113–18; on the predicament of tobacco-growers see ‘Foreign Industrial Capital and the Peasantry in Honan’ in ibid., pp. 175–9.

²⁹ Sheridan, James, Chinese Warlord (Stanford, 1966), p. 248.Google Scholar

³⁰ Bose, Sisir K. (ed.), The Voice of Sarat Chandra Bose (Calcutta, 1979), p. 67.Google Scholar

³¹ See Bose, Agrarian Bengal, ch. 4.

³² Ibid.; B. R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj: The Economics of Decolonization, 1914–1947 (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 2; Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, ch. 4.

³³ Bose, Agrarian Bengal.Google Scholar

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Scott, , Moral Economy, pp. 127–49.Google Scholar

³⁶ See Latham, A. J. H., The Depression and the Developing World (London, 1981), pp. 61–2.Google Scholar

³⁷ Nankai Institute of Economics, Nankai Index Numbers (Tientsin, 1934),Google Scholar cited in Gamble, Sidney H., Ting-hsien: a North China Rural Community (New York, 1954), pp. 252, 258.Google Scholar

³⁸ Friedman, Milton and Schwarz, Anna, A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, 1971), pp. 489–91;Google ScholarYoung, Arthur, China and the Helping Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 6;Google ScholarMyers, Ramon, The Chinese Economy: Past and Present (Belmont, California, 1980), pp. 174–7.Google Scholar

³⁹ Brandt, Loren and Sargent, Thomas, ‘Interpreting New Evidence about China and U.S. Silver Purchases’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 23, 1 (01. 1989), pp. 31–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ ‘Trade Capital and Paper Money in Chinese Villages’ in Institute of Pacific Relations, Agrarian China, pp. 157–60.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 159.

⁴² Myers in Fairbank (ed.), Cambridge History of China, 13, 2, p. 265.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ibid., p. 264.

⁴⁴ Institute of Pacific Relations, Agrarian China, p. 178.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See Eastman in Fairbank (ed.), Cambridge History of China, 13, 2, pp. 601–8.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 584–92; see also, Eastman, Seeds of Destruction.

⁴⁷ Sinha, N. C. and Khera, P. N., Indian War Economy (Calcutta, 1962)Google Scholar cited in Baker, , An Indian Rural Economy, p. 128.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Poduval, R. N., Finance of the Government of India since 1935 (Delhi, 1951), pp. 119–20.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Gadgil, D. R. and Sovani, N. V., War and Indian Economic Policy (Poona, 1943) cited in Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 75.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Famine Enquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (Delhi, 1945), p. 217.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 28–9.

⁵² Sen, , Poverty and Famines, pp. 54–5.Google Scholar

⁵³ Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, p. 89.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 90–4.

⁵⁵ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 56.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, p. 95.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 79.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ The offer of rice from Southeast Asia was made by Subhas Bose in radio broadcasts to India. See note by R. Tottenham, Additional Secretary, Home Department, Government of India, 1 September 1943, in Home Political Files (National Archives of India) cited in Bose, Krishna, Charanarekha Taba (in Bengali, Calcutta, 1982), pp. 66–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Eastman, in Fairbank (ed.), Cambridge History of China, 13, 2, p. 584.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 585; Young, Chinese Wartime Economy, p. 304.

⁶² Eastman, , Seeds of Destruction, p. 54.Google Scholar

⁶³ Young, , Chinese Wartime Economy, p. 270, and pp. 299–305;Google Scholar see also Suyin, Han, Birdless Summer, pp. 293–5.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Young, , Chinese Wartime Economy, p. 325.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Eastman, , Seeds of Destruction, p. 48: see also pp. 49–68.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Myers in Fairbank (ed.), Cambridge History of China, 13, 2, p. 268; also Eastman in ibid., pp. 605–6.

⁶⁷ White, Theodore and Jacoby, Analee, Thunder out of China (New York, 1946), pp. 172–7.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 173.

⁶⁹ ‘Mme Chiang asks Arms not Food; Says Ammunition is Great Need’, New York Times, 25 Feb. 1943.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Khanh, , Vietnamese Communism, p. 299.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Long, , Before the Revolution, pp. 130–2.Google Scholar

⁷² Khanh, , Vietnamese Communism, p. 299.Google Scholar

⁷³ Ibid, p. 301.

⁷⁴ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, pp. 67–70.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, p. 94.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 69.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, p. 95.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Sen, , Poverty and Famines, p. 101.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ See White and Jacoby, Thunder out of China, and Long, Before the Revolution.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Greenough, , Prosperity and Misery, pp. 264–5.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Perdue, Peter C. and Wong, R. Bin, ‘Famine's Foes in Ching China’ in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 43, 1 (06 1983), pp. 291–332.Google Scholar

⁸² Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, pp. 181–5.Google Scholar

⁸³ Greenough, , Prosperity and Misery, chs 4 and 5.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Sen, Amartya, ‘Family and Food: Sex Bias in Poverty’ and ‘Economics and the Family’ in Resources, Values and Development (Oxford, 1985), pp. 346–85.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ On the Vietnam story see Long, Before the Revolution, esp. pp. 246–50; on China see Eastman, Seeds of Destruction, and White and Jacoby, Thunder out of China.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Kuan-chung, Lo, Three Kingdoms: China's Epic Drama (New York, 1976, translated and edited by Roberts, Moss), p. xxiii.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ Famine Enquiry Commission, Report on Bengal, appendices.

⁸⁸ Greenough, , Prosperity and Misery, pp. 270–1.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Bose, , Agrarian Bengal, pp. 219–31.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Greenough, , Prosperity and Misery, p. 266.Google Scholar

⁹¹ White, and Jacoby, , Thunder out of China, p. 171.Google Scholar

⁹² Ibid., pp. 177–8; Sheridan, China in Disintegration, p. 262.

⁹³ Long, , Before the Revolution, pp. 233–8.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ Khanh, , Vietnamese Communism, pp. 312–13; also pp. 301–2.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ Ibid., p. 314.

⁹⁶ Tai, Hue Tam, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass., 1983);CrossRefGoogle ScholarWerner, Jayne, Peasant Politics and Religious Sectarianism: Peasant and Priest in the Cao Dai in Vietnam (New Haven, 1981).Google Scholar

⁹⁷ The distinction between attitudes to chronic hunger and dramatic famines in contemporary India and China is drawn in Sen, ‘How is India Doing?’, The New York Review of Books, 16 Dec. 1982,Google Scholar reprinted in Khan, Iqbal (ed.), Fresh Perspectives on India and Pakistan: Essays on Economics, Politics and Culture (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar