The political economy of land reform in China's "newly liberated areas": Evidence from Wuxi County

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 195, 2008, Pages 675-690

  Kung, James Kai Sing ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HOUSEHOLD STRUCTURE; LAND REFORM; LAND TENURE; LANDHOLDING; LANDOWNERSHIP; POLITICAL ECONOMY; RURAL PLANNING; VILLAGE;

ASIA; CHINA; CHONGQING; EURASIA; FAR EAST; WUXI [CHONGQING];

EID: 51849085218     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741008000829     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. See, for example, the classic work of William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1966)
2. Isabel and David Crook, Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1959).
3. Article 6, Agrarian Reform Law, reprinted in Mao Zedong, Selected Writings of Mao Zedong, Vol. 4 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1960)
4. See also Robert Ash, "Economic aspects of land reform in Kiangsu, 1949-52 (part 1)," The China Quarterly, No. 66 (1976), pp. 261-92
5. Li Haiwen, "Tudi geming shiqi zhongguo gongchandang dui funong zhengce de zhuanbian" ("The change in the Communist Party's policy toward the rich peasants during the land revolution period"), Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (Research on Communist Party History), No. 5 (1987), pp. 71-73
6. Edwin E. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), among others.
7. Due to extraordinarily high land pressure, there were indeed tensions between the parent Agrarian Reform Law, which was unambiguous in its regard of affording protection to the rich peasants, and local modifications that tended to resort to a less lenient practice. See Ash, "Economic aspects (part 1)," pp. 289-90.
8. Robert Ash, "Economic aspects of land reform in Kiangsu, 1949-52 (part 2)," The China Quarterly, No. 67 (1976), pp. 519-45.
9. Although the survey in question was conducted in the same year as the Great Leap Forward was launched, we are still confident that the answers obtained were reasonably reliable, primarily because the questions asked were basically factual in nature. For instance, instead of asking the respondents about their attitudes or perceptions of land reform - questions that tend to invite "politically correct" answers - they were simply required to provide factual information pertaining to household demographic structure, the type and quantity of assets they owned, and, for 1952, the amount of land and other items they received in land reform.
10. At least two historians have made use of part if not all of this dataset. See Lynda S. Bell, One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)
11. Li Zhang, "Peasant household economy under the influence of international trade, industrialization, and urbanization: A case study of Wuxi peasants' response to economic opportunities, 1860s-1940s" (Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002). None, as far as we know, has used the data on land reform.
12. Chen Han-seng, Landlord and Peasant in China: A Study of the Agrarian Crisis in South China (Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1936).
13. See also the debates of pertinent issues in Philip C. C. Huang (ed.), The Development of Underdevelopment in China: A Symposium (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980).
14. These four villages were located in the townships or xiang of Dongting in the centre (Zhuangqiao village or village 1), Yanqiao in the north (Liuxiang village or village 2), Yuchi in the far north-west (Yudong village or village 3) and Hudi in the south-west (Maan village or village 4). See Figure 1.
15. Robert Roll Jr., "The distribution of rural incomes in China: A comparison of the 1930s and the 1950s" (PhD dissertation, Department of Economics, Harvard University, 1974).
16. Ash, "Economic aspects (part 2)," p. 532, especially n. 26.
17. Ibid. p. 525.
18. The only exception was rescinded loan.
19. Concern for egalitarianism was obviously a primary cause of why local officials in Wuxi redistributed more land to poor peasants. But there may also be an "efficiency" explanation, namely that village officials want to prevent a large number of undersized farms that could result from redistributing smaller amounts of land to the poor. See ibid. pp. 525 and 528-31.
20. The Gini coefficients for Wuxi county as found by other scholars, which ranged from 438 to 667, were thus strikingly similar to what we find here. See Chao Kang, Zhongguo chuantong nongcun de diquan fenbu (The Distribution of Land Rights in China's Traditional Villages) (Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 2005), p. 73. Note also that the Ginis varied even within the same county.
21. Joseph Esherick, "Numbers games: A note on land distribution in prerevolutionary China," Modern China, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1981), pp. 387-412.
22. The Gini for Shandong was .154, Henan .222 (Chao Kang, The Distribution of Land Rights, p. 73),
23. and Shaanxi below .23 (Qin Hui, "Fengjian jingji de guanzhong moshi - tugaiqian guanzhong nongcun jingji fenxi zhiyi" ("The 'Guanzhong model' in feudalistic society: An analysis of the rural economy before the land reform, Part 1"), Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu (Research on the Economic History of China), No. 1 (1993), pp. 73-84.
24. Our figure is close to those employed by Ash, "Economic aspects (part 2)," p. 520, who finds that the proportion of land owned by landlords in south Jiangsu ranged between 36.8% and 40%.
25. Robert Ash, Land Tenure in Pre-Revolutionary China: Kiangsu Province in the 1920s and 1930s (London: SOAS Research Notes and Studies No. 1, University of London, 1976), p. 3.
26. It appears that the peasant economy of south Jiangsu around the 1930s was predominated by those with holdings in the smallest size categories - of not exceeding 10 mu (ibid. p. 5). For the self-sufficient middle peasants in our Wuxi villages, for instance, average farm size was less than 10 mu (8.22 mu for these four villages, Table 4, column 6).
27. In village 1 there were not even rich peasants.
28. Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 82.
29. Qin Hui, "The 'Guanzhong model'," p. 76.
30. Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State, p. 104.
31. Essential labour referred to "ploughing, planting, reaping and the other major farming tasks" (Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development toward Socialism, 1949-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 48).
32. Ibid. p. 43.
33. This analysis is based on the minutes of a meeting organized by the Rural Works Committee of South Jiangsu (Sunan nongcun gongzuo weiyuanhui) (n.d.) on class classification. The document is entitled Wuxi xian nongcun jieji qingkuang cailiao (A Compendium of Materials on Rural Social Classes in Wuxi County), archival classification B1-2-17.
34. Qin Hui, "The 'Guanzhong model'," pp. 80-82.
35. By farming 6.34 mu himself and renting out 12.75 mu, clearly Ni was well within the stipulated limits of renting out not more than three times the amount of land he cultivated.
36. This suggests that the incidence of "absentee landlords" in south Jiangsu or Jiangnan was probably high.