The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This interlocking of family farming with wage labor furnished a large supply of cheap labor, which in turn acted as a powerful brake of capital accumulation in the economy. The formation of such a poor peasantry ultimately altered both the nature of village communities and their relations with the elites and the state, creating tensions that led in the end to revolution.

Case study of a rural area village in Hong Kong as an example of the effects of social change and economic development within a capitalist framework - covers historical aspects, the occupational structure, rural workers, cultivation techniques, farm management, property ownership, land tenure, family budgets, the standard of living, cultural factors, etc. Bibliography pp. 207 to 212.

This wholly original reassessment of critical issues in modern Chinese history traces social, economic, and ecological change in inland North China during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic. Using many new sources, Kenneth Pomeranz argues that the development of certain regions entailed the systematic underdevelopment of other regions. He maps changes in local finance, farming, transportation, taxation, and popular protest, and analyzes the consequences for different classes, sub-regions, and genders. Pomeranz attributes these diverse developments to several causes: the growing but incomplete integration of North China into the world economy, the state's abandonment of many hinterland areas and traditional functions, and the effect of local social structures on these processes. He shows that hinterlands were made, not merely found, and were powerfully shaped by the strategies of local groups as well as outside forces.

How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in arguing that in the Yangzi delta, China's most advanced agricultural region, population increase was what drove commercialization and collectivization, even as it was made possible by them. The processes at work, which the author terms involutionary commercialization and involutionary growth, entailed ever-increasing labor input per unit of land, resulting in expanded total output but diminishing marginal returns per workday. In the Ming-Qing period, involution usually meant a switch to more labor-intensive cash crops and low-return household sidelines. In post-revolutionary China, it typically meant greatly intensified crop production. Stagnant or declining returns per workday were absorbed first by the family production unit and then by the collective. The true significance of the 1980's reforms, the author argues, lies in the diversion of labour from farming to rural industries and profitable sidelines and the first increases for centuries in productivity and income per workday. With these changes have come a measure of rural prosperity and the genuine possibility of transformative rural development. By reconstructing Ming-Qing agricultural history and drawing on twentieth-century ethnographic data and his own field investigations, the author brings his large themes down to the level of individual peasant households. Like his acclaimed The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985), this study is noteworthy for both its empirical richness and its theoretical sweep, but it goes well beyond the earlier work in its inter-regional comparisons and its use of the pre- and post-1949 periods to illuminate each other.