Socioeconomic Relations in Pre-Communist China

Abstract

In an earlier issue of Modern China, Ramon H. Myers (1980: 243) challenged what he believed was the view held by most concerned scholars that in prerevolutionary China the relationships between landlords and tenant-farmers were invariably and-exploitative. Limiting himself to north China, he makes excellent use of the substantial material gathered and produced by Japanese social scientists before World War II. Dr. Myers has long been known as an authority on those materials as well as an economist who has done important work relating to Taiwan. It somewhat startling in view of his long association with data concerning landlord-tenant attitudes and activities to find him attributing modification of the view that landlord-tenant relations were oppressive to recent work by Ralph Thaxton (1975, 1977). A major point for which Myers (1980: 243) gives credit to Thaxton is the insight that Chinese tenants in the early twentieth century held certain rights and expected these rights to be upheld by the groups with which they were dealing. As a matter of fact, the same point has been made before. Indeed, the present writer underlined it in his dissertation more than