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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
In April of 1980 I was received by the Henan Province History Research Institute of the Henan Province Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to begin the first systematic oral political history project on peasant revolution in modern China. The focus of this project is on the problems of livelihood faced by the peasants of Lin county and several other counties in the pre-Liberation period, roughly 1911–49. In May I began an investigation of the history of rural Lin county and the village of Yao Cun, Lin county, Henan. In this essay I will sketch the general social and political history of Yao village in Republican years, and then draw from my preliminary field research to explain the relationship between land rent, the impoverishment of peasant smallholders, and political power in pre-Liberation China in one North China village. This relationship has received minimal emphasis in the literature on peasantry and change in pre-1949 China. One of the many reasons for this has been the tendency of past scholarship to stress the critically important role of the ‘middle peasant village’ in the Chinese revolution. The evidence from Yao cun offers a slight qualification of this middle peasant thesis.
I am indebted to Professors G. Willim Skinner, Jerome Ch'en, Edward Friedman, and Donald Hindley for their critical comments on an early draft of this article. The research for this articel was made possible by a grant from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, by a Travel Fellowship from the Office of the Chancellor of Brandeis University, and by the assistance of the Henan Province History Research Institute in Kaifeng and Zhengzhou, Henan, The People's Republic of China.
1 There are a number of middle range theories of the origins and development of CCP power, but few of these theories are based on any systematic first-hand microlevel accounts of village developments in pre-1949 China. My sense of this issue is that studies of several villages and counties within a single prefecture must be undertaken before moving to middle range theory, and that the latter ought to be limited to regional developments initially. Of course the cumulative results of such microlevel studies can provide the data that are necessary for a middle range theory of the Chinese revolution at the national level.
2 For a perceptive critique of the middle peasant thesis see Huang, Philip C. C., ‘Analyzing the Twentieth-Century Countryside: Revolutionaries vs. Western Scholarship,’ Modern China, Vol. 1 (04 1975), pp. 132–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The clearest and best elaboration of this middle peasant thesis is in Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth-Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 147–8, 290–1.Google Scholar
3 This section has benefitted from personal correspondence with G. William Skinner.
4 For an interesting study of aspects of Shang culture, see Chang, Kwang-chih, Shang Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
5 Hefa, Feng, Zhongguo nong cun jingji ziliao (Materials on the Chinese Village Economy) (Shanghai: Li Ming Press, 1935), pp. 180–95.Google Scholar
6 Henan Nangcun diaocha (Henan Village Investigations) (Shanghai: Shang Wu Press, 1934), pp. 1–166.Google Scholar
7 Compare this account of peasant immiseration under fixed rent with that of Myers, Ramon, The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hebei and Shandong 1890–1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 48–9, 108–9.Google Scholar According to Myers, the land tenure system functioned to ‘equalize land use’ and to ‘enable peasants with little land to farm more’ p. 48. Myers pays insufficient attention to the process of land rent, and he tends to ignore the relationship between landlords and district and county level powerholders. (See note below on this point.) To his credit, Myers does understand that the fixed rent system ‘proved harsh at times of poor harvests,’ but then he goes on to assume that tenants benefitted from good harvests under the fixed rent system, p. 108. As the evidence on Yao cun indicates the latter point is well taken, but, increasingly, as the 1920s wore on and smallholder-tenants became indebted to landlords even the good harvest had to be used to pay debts acquired via the fixed rent system.
8 For an informative essay on the Tian Men Hui, see Takeshi, Baba, ‘The Red Spear Society: Its Ideology and Organization,’ Studies in Society and Economy, Vol. 41 (1975).Google Scholar
9 The Tian Men Hui received strong support in Yao cun, but Yao cun was not among the three Heavenly Gate strongholds. These were in other districts of Lin county.
10 In the course of my readings on China's economy during the Republican era I have been struck by the frequency with which experts describe economic development without any reference to political power. The result of this unidimensional single-disciplinary approach has been a virtual absence oflogic and evidence in passages dealing with the Kuomintang, and the unsubstantiated assumption that Kuomintang county and district powerholders did not exercise close controls over the economy in areas like Lin county.
11 An intriguing study of the warlord system, which recognizes the Kuomintang tendency to absorb militarists but does not deal adequately with the personal relations between former Peiyang warlords like Pang Bingxun and the Chiang Kai-shek clique in North China after 1927, is Ch'i, Hsi-cheng, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 237.Google Scholar Hsi concludes that it ‘would be an error to view militarism under Nationalist rule as a mere extension of early Republican militarism.’ The peasants of Yao, however, viewed militarism in precisely such a category. Several of them even insisted that the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang had been in Yao cun since 1911—their earliest memory of the Kuomintang flag over Yao district headquarters.
12 Pang Bingxun chose Yao cun because the Yao Heavenly Gate Society was not as well organized as the Ren cun Heavenly Gate Society, and because a foothold in Yao cull, which had market ties to Ren district villages, supposedly would provide Pang with information about Heavenly Gate strongholds without exposing his Kuomintang troops to the full strength of the rebellion.
13 Cf. Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy, Chs I and 2, conclusion.
14 Cf. Esherick, Joseph W. (ed.), Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 28.Google Scholar
15 The point is made in a less detailed manner by Hinton, William, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 31–2.Google Scholar
16 I established this point in talks with peasant smallholders during my second stay in Yao cun, August, 1980.
