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The Last Thousand Years of Chinese History

Changing Patterns in Land Tenure*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Mark Elvin
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, The University, Glasgow, W.2.

Extract

It is immediately apparent to anyone who juxtaposes those two massive works of scholarship and patient investigation, Sudō Yoshiyuki's History of Land Tenure Systems in China, which is mostly concerned with the Sung dynasty, and John Lossing Buck's Land Utilization in China, which describes the early 1930s, that in the intervening thousand years the character of Chinese rural society changed, and changed radically.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

1 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, Chūgoku tochi seido shi kenkyū (History of Land Tenure Systems in China), Tokyo, 1954.Google Scholar

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6 Ibid., pp. 542–3.

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11 Which provided for the arrest and return of tenants absconding from official manors in K'uei-chou province, and from private properties in Shih and Ch'ien prefectures.

12 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, op. cit., (1954), p. 114.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 116–17. (My italics)

14 Smith, R. E. F., Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry, Cambridge, 1968, p. 4.Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., p. 179.

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27 I-ling, Fu, op. cit., 1961, p. 162.Google Scholar

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29 Ibid., pp. 188–9. By the twentieth century between one-third and two-fifths of the land farmed by tenants in the lower Yangtze valley was held in permanent tenure according to Yūji, Muramatsu, Chūgoku keizai no shakai taisei (The Social Structure of the Chinese Economy), Tokyo, 1949, p. 318.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., especially pp. 284–337.

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33 On the collection of the tribute grain see Ayao, Hoshi, Mindai sōun no kenkyū (Studies on the Ming Grain Tribute System), Tokyo, 1963, Chapter III;Google Scholar and Teruo, Nakahara, ‘Shindai ni okeru sōryō no shōhinka ni tsuite’, (‘The Mercantilization of the Tribute Grain under the Ch'ing Dynasty) Shigaku zasshi LXX (1958).Google Scholar

34 Op. cit., p. 51.Google Scholar

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39 Elvin, M., ‘The Gentry Democracy in Shanghai, 1905–1914’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge), 1968, pp. 115–16, 130–5.Google Scholar

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41 Smith, T. C., op. cit., Chapters VIII to XI.Google Scholar