Abstract
IN THE present nation-wide predicament, the main difficulty with which China is confronted is the steady worsening of the agrarian situation. Actually this has for a long time been the core of political agitation and civil dissension. The ever-increasing population pressure on resources has intensified the seriousness of an already acute problem. Political factions and their campaigns in China today are basically an organized struggle between the landowning gentry and the landless peasantry to gain power. It is argued that, since the gravity of the farm land tenure situation in China is recognized, one need not be alarmed, because the percentage of tenancy in China is not especially high and the trend of its growth has in the last thirty years been low in comparison with the upward curve in the United States whose proportion of tenants to all other farm operators soared from 25.6 percent in 1879 to 34.5 percent in 1945. However, it must be remembered that a numerical comparison, such as this, can help very little in clarifying the underlying fundamental differences of the tenancy problems between these two countries. An elaborate estimate regarding both the percentage and trend of farm tenancy, calculated by the National Agricultural Research Bureau, in 1937, shows that, of different tenure classes in 1911, the tenants constituted 28 percent, part owners, 23 percent, and full owners, 49 percent. Twenty-five years later, in 1937, the percentage of tenants had increased to 30 percent, part owners, to 24 percent, while the percentage of the full owners had shrunk to 46 percent.1 Still later in 1939, when the provinces with higher proportion of owner peasants in North China and Manchuria were lost to Japanese, the percentage of tenants in the fifteen provinces of Free
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