The Development of Capitalism in Modern Chinese Agriculture

Abstract

Except during the debate in the 1930s about the nature of China’s rural society, few scholars have examined the question of the level of the development of capitalism in agriculture in modern China. Quantitative research in this area has been even rarer. Therefore, there is a need for such studies. Different approaches to the questions ‘Was there capitalism in agriculture in modern China?’ and ‘To what degree did it develop?’ can be roughly summed up as follows: Liquidationists of the Trotskyite-Chen Duxiu school, who exaggerated the level of capitalism and believed that it dominated China’s agriculture while feudalism was merely a remnant force.² Another point of view held that capitalism had never existed in any form in China’s agriculture.³ But the majority believed that capitalism had developed to a certain degree in modern Chinese agriculture, though this development was very slow and of an insignificant proportion. From preliminary studies of the history and degree of the development of capitalism in agriculture it is my opinion that the last view conforms to the historical facts.

Ding Changqing works in the Institute of Economics at Nankai University. He has written widely on the salt and coal industries, as well as having been entrusted with much of the work for the sections on agriculture in a forthcoming work on The Development of Chinese Capitalism to be published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This important article follows on the previous one by Xu Xinwu by producing quantitative estimates for the specifically capitalist elements in Chinese agriculture. It focuses on three phenomena: managerial landlords, that is landlords who cultivated their land with hired labour, rather than renting it out; rich peasants, who themselves worked their land but also hired labour; and agricultural reclamation companies. The first two of these at least have been major themes also in the Western literature.¹