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

Abstract

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.

Land markets in late imperial and republican China

“…The size of the nominal discount varied from 10 per cent of the harvest for people with relatively weak rights (which were more like 10-or 20-year leases than truly permanent occupancy rights) to as much as 30 per cent of the harvest ; the real discount was somewhat smaller, since tenants with stronger long-term claims and lower rents generally also provided a larger share of the capital needed for farming than more insecure tenants did. 130 People who made a 'live sale ' and stayed on as tenants would have to have received relatively large rent discounts to fully offset the full discount that buyers received on the purchase price ; since rent discounts of that size usually seem to have gone to tenants with stronger claims to permanent occupancy, 131 I doubt that rent discounts can fully explain more than a handful of cases. They may, however, partially explain a large number of them.…”

Family Division and Mobility in North China

“…Fu-mei Chang Chen and Ramon Myers (1976), for example, view land sales as one type of resource transfer that permitted households to achieve economic goals that were themselves shaped by the household development cycle. John R. Shepherd (1988) argues that regional patterns of land concentration are produced not only by debt-sale, but through other processes which do not imply economic distress, including shifts from owner operation to managerial landlordism, immigration, and reclamation. and household labor in Russia.…”

“…When there already is class differentiation and if the rich have more children than the poor, then partible inheritance would cause larger estates to decline faster than smaller. However, he also speculates that extra children may be of economic benefit to a family and that their contribution may, under favorable circumstances, offset the losses incurred through partition, either through purchase of land or reclamation (Shepherd 1988:420-1).…”

Research Themes in Ming-Qing Socioeconomic History—The State of the Field

“…Although there were managerial landlords during the early Qing who produced crops for market and used hired labor on a relatively large scale (Adachi 1981), most landlords preferred to let their lands out to others and collect rent. Studies based on the Board of Punishments archives show that wealthy tenants also produced cash crops and hired labor (Liu Yongcheng 1982;Wu Liangkai 1983)-The notion that peasant impoverishment was the motive force behind tenancy has itself been attacked by John Shepherd, who argues that tenancy should instead be seen as a "mode of management" (Shepherd 1988).…”