How many landlords were there in rural areas of the Republic of China?

Lead: Generally speaking, there seems to be a serious phenomenon of land annexation in rural areas of the Republic of China, and the relationship between landlords and tenants is also quite tense. But I'm afraid that's not the case. How many landlords were there in the Republic of China, who should belong to the landlords and who shouldn't, and whether the widespread poverty of farmers was the result of land annexation, etc. All need to be reconsidered. According to the survey, rural landlords in the Republic of China seldom thought that there was a periodic law of "land annexation-peasant uprising" in the history of China: the more land was concentrated in the hands of some landlords at the end of the dynasty, the more desperate the peasants were, so they rose up and rebelled. The legitimacy of the modern "agrarian revolution" is also based on this periodic law. However, according to historical data, at least since the Northern Song Dynasty, this periodic law no longer exists. From the Northern Song Dynasty to the Republic of China, the general trend of rural land ownership change in China is not more and more concentrated, but more and more dispersed; The number of big landlords is not increasing but decreasing. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the big landlords in rural areas of China basically disappeared. There are two reasons for limiting the discussion to "at least from the Northern Song Dynasty". First, there is little information left before the Northern Song Dynasty. Second, before the Northern Song Dynasty, the imperial court often carried out the reform of "land equalization system", even if there was a so-called circulation rate, it would be interrupted by the reform. Since the Northern Song Dynasty, the system of "no land" and "no merger and suppression" were pioneered, and private land was allowed to be bought and sold freely. Since then, dynasties have generally followed suit. According to "common sense", since land can be bought and sold freely, we should intensify the merger. But the opposite is true. During the Northern Song Dynasty, there were many "first-class households" registered by local governments, covering an area of more than 400 mu. However, it is difficult to see landlords of this scale in yellow books and compiled books in Ming and Qing Dynasties. Take Huolu County, Hebei Province as an example. According to the statistics compiled by the county, the proportion of "big landlords" occupying more than 100 mu in the total number of farmers was only1.65,438+09% in the forty-five years of Kangxi and 1.54% in the four years of Yongzheng. Considering that most of these "big landlords" have not separated for generations, the gap between their per capita area and ordinary farmers will only be smaller. As Zhao Gang, a scholar in Taiwan Province, said: "Scholars engaged in empirical research in rural areas in Ming and Qing Dynasties all agree that by the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the big landlords had disappeared and the land was scattered in the hands of yeomen and small and medium-sized owners." During the Republic of China, the trend of "more and more dispersed" rural land continued. South Manchuria Railway Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "South Manchuria Railway") is a special enterprise set up by the Japanese to invade China. One of its important businesses is to conduct a detailed empirical investigation of China's national conditions. From 65438 to 0935, Man Tie investigated the land distribution of 453 villages in North China and recorded the number of fields owned by the largest landlord in each village. Among them, there are only two landlords who occupy more than 1000 mu, and the largest landlord in 2/3 villages occupies less than 200 mu. In the same period, the phenomenon of land dispersion in the south was more serious. According to the land records of Anhui and Zhejiang, the largest owner owns less than 100 mu of land. In the1939-1940s, Manchuria Railway also investigated 1 1 villages in four counties in southern Jiangsu. The results show that there are 173 landlords and only 159 tenants in these villages, with an average of each household. In other words, during the Republic of China, there were few big landlords in rural areas of China (Liu, a special bureaucratic warlord landlord, is beyond the scope of this topic). There is not much difference between a 10 family whose "landlord" occupies 200 mu of land and a family of three whose "yeoman" occupies 20 mu of land. Classifying the former as a "big landlord" and the latter as a "yeoman" is just a word game in the political sense. /kloc-in the 1940s, members of the American Flying Tigers filmed rural areas in southern China. Population explosion makes "land annexation" more and more difficult, and there is no soil for big landlords, which will lead to two problems. The first question is: Why did land merger slow down instead of intensifying after the government allowed land to be bought and sold freely? Not more and more big landlords, but fewer and fewer? The average land area of landlords is getting smaller and smaller instead of getting bigger and bigger? The key to the answer lies in population growth. From 1072 to 1950, the population soared from about 1 100 million to more than 550 million, and the per capita cultivated land decreased from 5.45 mu to 1.74 mu. On the one hand, the situation of less land and more people is becoming more and more serious and common, and farmers cherish their land more and more, and they are unwilling to sell it easily unless they have to. According to the Records of Huangxian County compiled during the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, Huangxian County in Shandong Province "has a vast territory and a sparse population, cherishing land as gold ... although it is powerful, there is no reason to merge", which refers to this situation. On the other hand, the speed of farmers' saving surplus wealth slows down because of the decrease of cultivated land per capita, while the land price rises because of the decrease of cultivated land per capita. This double pressure of falling and rising makes it more and more difficult for farmers to expand cultivated land. In the late Qing Dynasty, it often took decades or generations for a middle-class family to buy dozens of acres of land. The growth of population is the main reason why it is more and more difficult to "merge" and the scale of landlords is getting smaller and smaller. In addition, if a middle-class family successfully doubles the amount of cultivated land in 20 years, it is difficult for it to follow this wealth accumulation model and become a big landlord, because it will soon face the problem of school separation. If the middle-class family has only one son, its average land output will double; If you have two sons, the per capita land property will remain unchanged; If you have three sons, the average land output per household will decrease. Since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the population of China has soared, with the average number of children per household far exceeding two. The tradition of sharing property equally among all children has shattered the dream of "big landlords" of many middle-class families.