Civil War in Nationalist China/Chapter 4
IV. THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION
18. Land Ownership and Distribution
Although the city working class is the leader of the Chinese revolution, and has occupied the forefront of the stage, yet it is the peasantry, and the problem of the land, that forms the key to the Revolution in its present stage of development. The Chinese Revolution is now essentially an agrarian revolution.
The agrarian problem in China is so different in its forms from those in other lands, that a full understanding of it can only be gotten from long study. Only a limited material of scientific investigation is available. The most valuable is the investigation conducted by Michael Borodin, which will be the principal basis of an extended study on the peasant problem which I will publish soon. In the meantime, this pamphlet would not be complete without giving at least the main outlines of the position of the peasantry, and the importance of the land problem in the Revolution.
Private and absolute ownership of land is the basis of the Chinese landholding system. Socalled public lands are largely based upon private ownership (by family, clan, etc.).
A large proportion of the privately-owned land is in the hands of a relatively small class of landlords, who rent it to landless peasants. The socalled public land is also cultivated by landless peasants. Thus the preponderant element in agriculture is the tenant (varying in different provinces from 40% to 80%), and the agrarian question is dominated by the landlord-peasant relationship.
Peasant economics has been dragged under the influence of world markets, specialized cultivation, etc., but the social and legal relationships are still dominated by feudal and semi-feudal customs.
The unprogressive technic of agriculture, practically unchanged for thousands of years, produces an exceedingly minute division of units of cultivation. The tremendous pressure of population accentuates this factor and heightens the intensity of cultivation.
Out of these factors has grown an exploitation of the masses of peasantry amounting to 70% or 80% of their produce in the case of the main bulk of tenants or semi-tenants.
These are the main outlines of the fundamental question of the Chinese revolution. While the "bolshevik" workingclass in the cities is leading the revolution, yet at the same time the peasantry relentlessly drives the revolution on and on, making it impossible to find a compromisethat will stabilize China short of a thorough-going transformation of its entire economic and social system.
China's socalled public lands are in effect though not formally absorbed into the system of private ownership. There are 3 main forms of public lands, ancestral lands, village lands, and scholar fields. The most important is the ancestral land, which in Kwantung province comprises 25% of all cultivated fields. Rich landholders many generations ago set aside portions of their holdings to be preserved from division or sale, the produce of which was to be devoted to ancestor worship. Many also provided that a proportion of the income must be used to purchase additional land. These areas also grew through descendants demonstrating their piety by adding to the ancestral land.
Practically all the ancestral land is rented out, mostly to landless peasants or to middlemen who sublet it. The rents amount to huge sums, which enable the "elders" of the family to form the principal portion of the ruling caste wherever the ancestral lands exist.
The village public lands are those which have been set aside for special village needs, such as upkeep of the village school, road building, maintenance of village temple, etc. Instead of being administered by the elders of a single clan or family, they are in the hands of village elders comprising several families.
The scholar fields are lands of which the incomes have been assigned to certain learned persons as a reward for learning. These lands are either assigned from ancestral land to some one who has made his clan famous by becoming a scholar, or by a society of learning from great estates or funds procured from the government. These societies are a trade union of the literate sections of the village ruling class. All these lands are cultivated by propertyless tenants.
The mass of peasantry gets no benefits from public lands. The principal effect of this form of landownership is to weld into a closely-knit body, the village ruling class, the "gentry," who are the masters of the village, of its funds, its road building, irrigation, etc., who levy taxes, control the local militia, and administer "justice" to the peasantry.
19. The Peasant Unions
Ten million peasants are today organized in the Peasants' Union. This is the basic force which has made the Chinese Revolution, and shaken the political stability of the entire world outside of the United States. Organizing what is practically a new government from below, with its own armed forces for defense, the Peasant Movement is transforming China from one of the most backward countries into a modern land.
Most Chinese peasants are tenants, or semi-tenants. Their living conditions are so low, that it is hard for an American to understand how they can exist. The average income of a family of tenants is 36 dollars per year. Rent takes half of their produce or more; taxes of all kinds takes another 20%; and they finally have 3 dollars per month left to feed and clothe the family. Their food is a couple of bowls of rice a day, and "congee," a kind of grass fried in peanut oil, supplemented twice a month by a few ounces of fat pork. Their clothes consist of a plain cotton jacket and trousers, grass sandals, and a grass hat. Their houses are hardly fit for pigpens.
The great object of the Peasant Union now is to lift the terrific burdens of rent. At first they tried to reduce rents 25%. The landlords and gentry, in control of village governments, formed militia to crush their unions. The peasants thereupon formed their own defense corps, drove out the reactionary landlords from the village governments, and established their own power in the villages. This is what the Revolution means in the villages.
In the Province of Hunan (30 million inhabitants) there are now five million members of the Peasant Union. There the peasants are proceeding to abolish rents altogether, confiscating the lands. It was this development which caused the officers of the Revolutionary Armies (Generals Chiang Kai Shek, Feng Yu-hsiang, Tang Shen-shi) who are closely connected with landlord families, to turn against the revolutionary people and begin to compromise with the foreign powers and the Northern militarists (Chang Tso-lin) in order to check the revolution. It was this break-up of the united front of the Kuomintang which has brought a temporary check in the development of the Chinese Revolution.