Land Rent, Peasant Migration, and Political Power in Yao Cun, 1911–1937
In April of 1980 I was received by the Henan Province History Research Institute of the Henan Province Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to begin the first systematic oral political history project on peasant revolution in modern China. The focus of this project is on the problems of livelihood faced by the peasants of Lin county and several other counties in the pre-Liberation period, roughly 1911–49. In May I began an investigation of the history of rural Lin county and the village of Yao Cun, Lin county, Henan. In this essay I will sketch the general social and political history of Yao village in Republican years, and then draw from my preliminary field research to explain the relationship between land rent, the impoverishment of peasant smallholders, and political power in pre-Liberation China in one North China village. This relationship has received minimal emphasis in the literature on peasantry and change in pre-1949 China. One of the many reasons for this has been the tendency of past scholarship to stress the critically important role of the ‘middle peasant village’ in the Chinese revolution. The evidence from Yao cun offers a slight qualification of this middle peasant thesis.