An Examination and Interpretation of Farmland Rights Distribution

The proportion of farmland occupied by landlords and rich peasants was an important indicator of the distribution of land rights in the modern era and a basis for understanding China’s land property system and modern economy. However, there has been a lack of convincing primary data on land issues in modern China. In the 1940s and 1950s, an informative nationwide survey was conducted for land reforms under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Although accurate national data were not published then, this land survey laid some foundation for subsequent statistical work. This chapter examines the proportion of land held by the top 10% of the wealthy rural class on the eve of the Land Reform Movement, based on the data collected by the land reform survey while referring to survey data from the Republican Period. According to our study, the accuracy of the data from the southern provinces was around 30% (± 5%), while the data from the northern provinces was well below this level. Moreover, the actual comprehensive data was even lower than the level presented by this data if the occupation status of land rights such as top-soil right, permanent tenancy rights, and common land was considered. This chapter argues that previous studies have exaggerated the phenomenon and trend of land concentration in modern China, and one of the crucial reasons for this exaggeration was the neglect of the role played by the negative feedback mechanisms that inhibited and hedged against the concentration of land rights.