ABSTRACT
When the civil war ended - an event the Chinese call "Liberation" - China was essentially an agricultural country. Consequently, China's man/land ratio deteriorated to an extent that today is paralleled only in areas of acutest population explosions, such as the Caribbean, Mexico, Java and West Bengal and Kerala in India. In periods of high labour demand, the impoverished small farmers banded together to do their own as well as the landlord's field work jointly, or the landlord recruited a labour gang from among local landless farm-hands. Increasingly frequently, tenant farmers were forced by their growing inability to pay rent in full or on time to accept substitute obligations in the form of labour; over time, these arrangements developed into a tacit bondage system. Even if the Communists had not come to power in China, any central government that was serious about national reconstruction would have had to deal with the rural land/labour/land-fertility problem on a priority basis.
