ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the distribution of land ownership in the prewar Chinese peasant economy. The maldistribution of property rights in land, in conjunction with lack of adequate land resources, forced a majority of the agricultural population to seek means of subsistence through some combination of land rental, farm or non-farm wage labor or subsidiary enterprise. The proportional rent system, while less common than the fixed rent system, was still in use among about one out of three tenants and moreover showed no clear tendency to decline over this period. Averaging the data by crop region, however, brought out some at least “suggestive” relationships between share-cropping and risk. The schedule may be treated as a record of the desired investment portfolio structure of the landlord when the choice is between financial investment of varying sums in land, at different, near-certain rates of return, and in loans, at higher but uncertain realized rates of return.
