Outline of the Institutions for Farmland Transactions in Traditional China

As the primary production source in an agricultural society, farmland and its related institutions underlie the processes of resource allocation and business operations. To analyze them is the first and most fundamental task if one wants to understand the transformation of China from a traditional society to a modern one. Such understanding is also key to the current agricultural reforms and is of exceptional theoretical value for world economic history. While previous understanding and assessments of this fundamental issue were anything but uniform, breakthroughs have been made over the recent two decades.