The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2
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THE AGRARIAN CRISIS
26l
and cotton-cloth weaving, declined during this decade, and the rural
industries of embroidery, carpet making, straw braiding, fancy lace work,
oil pressing, paper making, and the production of tea and sugar also
declined or stagnated. The changes in demand affecting the first two of
these deserves some comment. First, synthetic fibres began to replace the
Chinese silk that had so long been used in garments produced and sold
in major Western markets. Between 1923 and 1930, Chinese silk prices
in New York declined by 67 per cent.
91
This substitution rapidly reduced
the demand for silk thread and cloth on the part of foreign export firms
in Chekiang, Fukien and Kwangtung.
92
Moreover, the synthetic fibres
imported into China increased in volume to the point at which they
gradually expelled domestic silk from such markets as Hangchow.
93
Nishida Hakutaro, a Japanese observer of the silk industry, pointed out
in the late 1920s that increased exports of synthetic fibre to China had
'very recently' dealt the depressed Chinese silk industry still another
serious setback. In his opinion, this had made Japan the world's leading
silk producer.
94
Nor did the Chinese cotton industry escape hard times. Rising prices
for cotton cloth during the First World War had brought prosperity to
the new rural weaving centres, and merchants supplied more looms and
yarn to expand cloth production. After 1920, however, foreign cotton
articles again began competing with handicraft cloth (t'u-pu).
9s
Japanese
spinning mills in Tientsin and Tsingtao had previously sold most of their
yarn to the Chinese merchants who supplied weaving centres. But between
1920 and 1924, the number of mechanized looms in these mills increased
more than threefold. By 1924—5 they had begun producing machine-made
cloth that was superior to the native fu-pu. While the Japanese mills in
the city-ports expanded production, the Chinese mills barely stayed in
business, plagued as they were by labour strikes, managerial difficulties,
and scarcity of working capital. A few weaving centres, like those of Wei
county (Shantung), managed to obtain machine-spun yarn cheaply enough
to weave cloth by hand and still remain in business. But this was at the
expense of other centres, such as Kao-yang (Hopei), which they
undersold.
96
In 1926, Kao-yang produced only 544,125 p'i of cloth
compared to over one million/)'/ in
1921.
97
Other cloth-weaving centres
were affected in the same way.
98
Probably the chief source of market instability in this period was civil
•' lbid.y 4.
92
Ibid.
3.7; Tda kenkyujo, Sbina seisbi no stkai leki ebii (The world status of Chinese silk-reeling),
63.
" P'eng Tse-i, 3.5.
94
Ibid.
»s
Ibid.
3.17.
96
Ibid.
3.18. <n
Ibid.
98
Ibid.
3.19-25.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
262
THE
AGRARIAN SYSTEM
war.
The
years 1924-7 brought terrible violence
and
suffering
to
millions
of villagers. Competing warlords imposed
a
variety of new taxes
and
levies
upon farmers
—
a
burden aggravated
by the
decline
in
sales
due to
railway
stoppages
and
loss
of
storage facilities." Even
in 1916,
intermittent
warfare
had
broken
out in
9
of
the
22
provinces,
but the
violence appears
to have heavily affected some
15
provinces between
1925 and
1928.
It>0
Shantung
was
especially hard
hit, and
each year hundreds
of
thousands
of villagers, fearing
for
their lives, fled from
it to
other provinces.
A
Japanese study
of
military campaigns
and
farmer self-defence units during
this period paints
a
picture
of
stark terror
and
misery endured
by all
classes.
Not only have arson, theft,
and
rape occurred everywhere, as
if
wild
beasts were
on
the
prowl,
but
murders
and
kidnappings
are
performed
in
broad daylight.
Further, after
the
food mobilized
for
the
military
has
been seized
by
bandit groups,
more food
is
forcibly taken by various warlord armies.
In
this fashion, peasants
in
the
same locale
are
pillaged
two and
three times
by
outsiders. Bandits
and
warlord factions abscond with their chickens
and
dogs.
The
people
are
without
houses, without food,
and
their plight
has
become extremely miserable. They
now
are
abandoning their villages;
the old, the
young,
and the
women flee
to
Manchuria
and the
south. These waves
of
migrations
are
like
an
endless tide;
no matter
how
much time elapses,
the
same conditions continue
to
persist.
101
A spate
of
natural disasters, unusual
in
their severity
and
frequency even
for China, struck various provinces.
In 1918, a
great drought swept
six
northern provinces, killing 500,000 people
and
severely injuring crops
in
317 counties.
In
February
of the
same year,
a
great earthquake ripped
Shensi
and
Kansu.
In 1921, six
provinces suffered great floods.
102
The
following year,
a
typhoon struck Swatow,
and in the
year after that, twelve
provinces experienced both drought
and
floods.
By 1924 and 1925, the
scope
and
impact
of
such natural disasters worsened because
so
much
labour
had
been diverted
to
warfare
and
could
not be
mobilized
to
provide
proper
relief.
Yunnan suffered
a
tremendous earthquake
and
then great
floods. Six more provinces experienced crop pests,
and
floods churned
over
the
Yellow River region.
103
These calamities, together with
the
outbreak
of
violence
and
warfare,
produced
the
greatest movement
of
refugees
in
over
a
century. Millions
fled the northern provinces
for
Manchuria.
I04
Farmland
in
many parts
of
the country became wasteland.
The
beneficiaries
of
these disasters were
99
Chang
Yu-i,
2.559-89.
Io
° Ibid.
2.609.
101
SMR:
Kozawa Shigeichi,
Sbina no diran to Santo nison
(Shantung villages and the upheaval
in
China),
3.
I02
Chang
Yu-i,
2.619.
103
Walter
H.
Mallory, China:
land
of
famine,
chs. 1, 2.
l0
* Chang
Yu-i,
2.659-60.
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THE AGRARIAN CRISIS 263
the warlord armies, as their ranks swelled with the very young and the
aged. Rabble bands of these armies and outlaws swarmed like hordes of
locusts across the countryside, destroying everything in their path: Hunan,
one of the country's major rice bowls, actually ceased shipping grain
to
cities on the lower Yangtze.
105
All these developments contributed to widespread rural unemployment.
There was
a
sudden increase in food imports to feed the large city-ports.
The government employment statistics, notoriously unreliable though
they are, provide some indication of the catastrophe. For 1925, unemploy-
ment was reported at over 168 million persons, of whom 87 million were
supposed
to be
farmers and rural labourers.
106
Imports
of
rice, wheat,
flour, tobacco and raw cotton had increased but slowly since the 1870s.
After 1921, however, they jumped to unprecedented levels. Rice imports
doubled once in volume between 1921 and 1922, and nearly once again
between 1925 and 1926. Even more spectacularly, wheat imports doubled
between 1923 and 1924, and rose seven times between 1925
and
1926.
Similar jumps occurred for flour and raw cotton imports.
107
The Nanking
decade
Just
as it
began
to
seem that there was
no
end
to
agrarian crises,
the
Kuomintang and its armies defeated the northern warlords. Peace came
to most of the country in 1928. At the same time the weather improved,
bringing good harvests. But new difficulties
lay
just ahead. Although
sporadic warfare continued
in
some provinces and farmers paid higher
taxes,
these were not as troublesome
for
the farming population as the
events between 1932
and
1934. From 1921
to
1931, while Western
countries were reeling under the shock of worldwide economic depression,
China benefited from
the
devaluation
of her
silver currency, which
boosted her exports
in
both quantity and value.
108
The first blow came
with the loss
of
the Manchurian market
in
1932. The second followed
in 1933-4,
as a
large quantity
of
silver flowed
out of
the country
in
response
to
rising silver prices
in
the United States. Exports declined;
the money-supply contracted violently; commodity price levels took
a
nose-dive. The result for the rural economy was massive deflation.
The silk and cotton handicraft industries, already deep in trouble, were
especially hard hit between 1932 and 1935. 'The loss
of
the north-east
•«
Ibid.
2.632.
io6
p.
eng
Tse
.
if 3
.
66
.
"" Chang Yu-i, 2.674.
108
\ff
u
Ta-yeh, 'Shih-chieh ching-chi shuai-lo chung chih Chung-kuo' (China during world
economic collapse),
in
Fang Hsien-t'ing, ed.
Cbung-kuo
cbing-fbi jett-cbiu (Studies
of
the Chinese
economy),
1.4J-56.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
264 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM
greatly influenced silk sales from Chao-hsing (Chekiang): production in
1931 was 156,000/)'/, each/)'/ priced at $zyuan, for a total
of
5,075,200
yuan.
When compared to 1929 this was a decline of more than 43,000/)'/
valued
at a
loss of more than two million yuan.'
109
After the Japanese
occupied Manchuria, they raised import duties
-
an action that, according
to
the
same source, 'effectively blocked silk imports from Yen-t'ai
(Shantung)'.
110
Importers of cotton cloth in Dairen and throughout south
Manchuria ceased buying from the China market.
In
Lao-yang, Ting,
Yu-tien, and Ch'ing-shou counties
of
Hopei, and
in
T'ung-chou and
Ch'ang-te counties of Kiangsu, the consequences were serious enough to
have an adverse effect on the entire cotton textile industry.'
11
Villagers'
demand for yarn from spinning mills greatly declined.
In 1931 and 1932, as world trade began contracting, so did Chinese
handicraft exports of silk, special silk products, cotton cloth, straw braid,
paper, porcelain, bamboo, oilseed products, and hemp cloth, which
together made up roughly
50
per cent of total exports. Farm labour greatly
contributed to their supply, and the decline in handicraft income forced
rural households to alter expenditures. By
1936—7,
these handicraft exports
were still far below the all-time high of
1930—1,
in both quantity and value.
In fact, their prices fell more rapidly than foodgrain prices.
112
For tea,
tobacco, beverages, livestock, grain, cotton goods and oilseed products,
the price indices in Tientsin and Shanghai show a steady decline during
the years 1931
to
1934. Soon domestic prices fell as well, and farmers
quickly found that the lower sale price could not even cover their unit
production costs. Chen Han-seng reported
in
1934 that the farmers
in
Kwangtung took mulberry fields out of production so that ' the area of
mulberry land declined by more than 30 per cent'.
113
A study of the tea
industry reported
a
similar decline
in
crop area.
114
The economic
conditions for cotton production had equally gloomy indications for the
farming population.
Recently, [around 1932] the collapse of the world economy has become more
pervasive and has caused the prices of farm products to fall. The major cotton
markets in China were hard hit by world cotton market conditions, so that in
every cotton market throughout our country production costs could not be
covered, as buying in the market had declined."
5
The same source goes on to describe how,
in
Shensi, production costs
of cotton exceeded its market price by three times. The downward plunge
"*» P'eng Tse-i, 5.392.
"°
Ibid.
3.393.
•"
Ibid.
3.396.
"
2
Chang Yu-i, 3.615.
113
Ibid.
3.627.
"
4
Ibid.
3.629-30.
•"
Ibid.
3.632.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE AGRARIAN CRISIS 265
in cotton prices in Hupei and Chekiang also squeezed the peasantry in
a vice-like grip of high fixed costs and falling marketed sales.
But it was not just the contraction of world trade that ruined the rural
economy. The great outflow of silver from the hinterland to coastal cities
that began in 1932 was an unprecedented movement of financial capital
out of agriculture, sparked by rising silver prices in the United States.
It occurred at precisely the time when the rural economy urgently needed
credit. A sharp fall in the rate of return for investing in agriculture
accompanied the outflow of silver. Bank deposits in Shanghai more than
doubled between 1932 and
1933.
116
Farmers had yet another blow to endure. In time past, when China
periodically suffered crop failures in different areas because of drought
or flood, local officials had responded by distributing grain or by
purchasing it from other provinces. During this period, however, the
weakening of- administrative capability prevented these measures from
working as successfully as in the past. Some areas even began to suffer
famine. A Chinese rural investigation team that visited Shensi in 1933
described the misery in the countryside in the team diary.
July 14 [1933]- We investigated the Shih-chia-mo village. Shih-chia-mo has
irrigated land; the water comes from a small river. When drought occurs, the
stream dries up, and the irrigated land becomes dry land. Opium is cultivated
on this irrigated land, and the county administration taxes this land. In March
of this year the peasants had to eat grass and bark. Since May they have eaten
scarcely anything except grass. They still eat the leftovers from oilseed bearing
plants, bran, etc. Now that wheat is being harvested, they will have flour again.
This
flour
is
mixed with straw, and water
is
added to make
a
soup called
p'an-fang
[literally, 'a bowl of
soup'].
A person eats no more than two flour cakes at meal
time.
There are days when a person eats only one meal a day. Death from
starvation, death from sickness,
flight,
selling oneself
into
bondage are common
occurrences...
July 15. Hsiao-t'ang village is much poorer than other villages. The peasants
in this village starved to death in the autumn of
1928.
The price of wheat in the
county is eight or nine
yuan
per
tou,
and only those with money can afford to
buy it. The gates of the county seat are closed to prevent the peasants from
entering. The townspeople are afraid that once they are inside, they will steal
everything."
7
Such conditions were commonplace in many rural areas during the early
1930s. How different from the countryside described by Richthofen and
King!
116
Ibid.
3.678.
117
Hsing-cheng-yuan nung-ts'un fii-hsing wei-yuan-hui, comp. Sban-bsi
sbeng
mmg-tftm tiao-cb'a (A
survey of villages in Shensi province), 164.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
266 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM
Between 1931 and 1933, rich and poor alike had to sell their land. The
resulting redistribution of land ownership was very complex; many
households abandoned the ranks of the wealthy to others. In 1933, the
Committee for Village Reconstruction in the Executive Yuan of the
Nationalist government examined a sample of
15
5,000
households in
seventeen districts of Shensi, Kiangsu, Chekiang, Yunnan and Kwangsi.
The period covered by the sample was from 1928 to 1933. The committee
found that in eight districts the number of landlord households increased,
in four districts their number declined, and in five it remained
unchanged.
118
It also found that wealthy households declined in fourteen
districts and increased in only three districts. The number of middle-range
households owning some land, yet obtaining income from wages, fell in
thirteen districts, increased in three districts, and remained unchanged in
another. The number of poor households - that is, households whose
income was mainly from wages - increased in fourteen of the seventeen
districts. Many wealthy families lost both land and economic status. Closer
inspection of land acquisition also shows that in Kiangsu, many
middle-level families enlarged their holdings even as the total number of
families at this level was declining.
119
How unequal land distribution
became between 1928 and 1933 may never be known for certain. The basic
cause of these developments, however, was clearly the market instability
that engulfed the countryside, not control of the village economy by an
entrenched landlord elite.
The rvar years
In 1937, Japan invaded China. For the next eight years the Chinese were
engaged in mortal combat with a powerful adversary. After that they had
to endure four years of fratricidal civil war before peace came at last. A
country at war not only loses many of the goods and services it normally
produces; it also risks losing the capital stock upon which its future
productive capacity depends. The longer the period of warfare, the greater
the sacrifice required of the people to replace the capital lost or worn out.
The breakdown of production and economic organization is accompanied
by social changes that gradually make themselves felt as a disregard for
morals and convention, and a tendency for the strong to abuse the weak.
The Japanese invasion of North China in 1937 badly frightened the
• is
Furushima Kazuo, ' Kyu Chugoku ni okeru tochi shoyu to sono seikaku' (Land ownership and
its characteristics in traditional China), in Yamamoto Hideo and Noma Kiyoshi,
Chugoku noson
kahuna
no
tenkai (The development of the Chinese agrarian revolution), 41.
"* Hsing-cheng-yuan nung-ts'un fu-hsing wei-yuan-hui, comp.
Ckung-kuo,
1.25, 28, 30.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE AGRARIAN CRISIS 267
merchants and moneylenders. They closed their shops and fled. The
movement of so many troops along major roads and railways
—
the
Chinese fleeing and the Japanese advancing
—
quickly led to the conscrip-
tion of rural labour and the confiscation of their carts and draft animals.
Aside from several large battles in the next few years, conditions in North
China soon stabilized. But after 1941 Chinese guerrilla warfare intensified,
and the Japanese retaliated with search-and-destroy operations. The
overall effect of the war upon the North China countryside is very hard
to determine because comprehensive surveys of damage were never
undertaken. On the basis of local surveys made between 1938 and 1943,
one Chinese scholar attempted a general assessment of how extensively
war had affected agricultural production.
As for changes in crop area, we can say that there was a shift from commercial
crops to major food crops. The area under cotton cultivation fell most of all,
and the cultivated area for millet, potato, etc., rose. Sorghum was a major
foodgrain for farm families, and the Japanese military prevented large-scale
planting of the crop in order to eliminate the
fields
as protective covering for
guerrillas. Therefore, its cultivated area declined. The total cultivated area,
however, declined very litde.
120
The 1939 harvest was especially poor, mainly because of poor weather.
By
1941—2,
however, output and yields had recovered to their 1937 levels.
Then, from 1942 onwards, farm production appears to have declined
severely.
In
1943,
and thereafter, the Japanese intensified their
fighting,
conscripted more
people for their campaigns, and destroyed considerable life and property. The
time lost by not farming, the shortage of labour animals and manpower, and
the great shift toward more self-sufficiency by farmers caused a deterioration in
the quality of farming and reduced output to a lower
level.
It is possible that the
three-year period from 1940 to 1942 was the most stable and best period for
agriculture in the north during the entire war.
121
Changing land-use patterns and growing shortages of labour and draft
animals also occurred in other parts of the country. In 1938 and 1939,
the Nationalist government retreated to Szechwan and Yunnan. As a
result, cities such as Chungking more than tripled their size overnight.
The new city-dwellers, mostly of middle-class origin, preferred a diet of
pork, chicken, eggs, flour, vegetables and fruit. The surrounding region
could not produce a sufficient quantity to satisfy demand. Prices rose, and
120
Ma Li-yuan,' Chan-shih Hua-pei nung-tso-wu sheng-ch'an chi ti-wei
tui
liang-shih chih lieh-to'
(Agricultural production and pillaging
of
foodstuffs
by
the Japanese and their puppets
in
North
China during the war), Sbc-huik'o-bsuth Isa-cbih, IO.I (June 1948) 65.
121
Ibid.
71-2.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
268 THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM
farmers responded by reallocating much of their land and labour to these
products instead of foodgrains, which consequently fell into short
supply.
122
By 1941-2, the price of
rice,
wheat, and other foodgrains began
to rise against those of special farm products. Farmers accordingly began
to shift more of their land into the production of these foodgrains.
Meanwhile, the wartime demand for labour had diverted many young men
away from farming to work in factories and transportation, not to mention
service on the front lines. By 1943, there were many indications that the
south-west farm economy had been extended to its limits. Farm
production was declining, albeit gradually. There was drought, but the
main reason was the scarcity of farm labour.
123
During peaceful, stable times, farm production might fall briefly but
quickly recover. But under wartime conditions, when labour was with-
drawn from planting, soil care, or harvesting, production declined on a
sustained basis. Labour-intensive crops were, of course, the hardest hit.
There were major regional variations in types of crops and the frequency
with which they were planted, so that a withdrawal of the same amount
of labour in the north or south affected production quite differently.
The farms that supplied the largest share of marketed surplus usually
employed part-time labour. Although the demand for farm crops pulled
farm prices upward, the cost of hiring farm labour during peak farming
periods rose more rapidly than many crop prices. We know that this
situation was very serious in Szechwan after
1941.
124
Presumably the same
was true in other parts of the country. By 1943-4, many farms were caught
in a severe price and cost squeeze, and had to cut back on the amount
of land they could sow. The large, well-to-do farms still had sufficient
land to feed themselves. Nevertheless, the cutbacks caused total production
to decline and land use patterns to change. As a result, the marketed
surplus of industrial crops declined most of
all.
Even the sale of foodgrains
to the cities fell.
The burdens of war still fell mainly upon the rural
people.
Graham Peck,
who travelled extensively in southern Shensi and northern Honan in 1941,
reported that troops everywhere conscripted farmers' carts and even
members of farm families. Wherever he went, ' the one problem of crises
which really interested the farmers was the Kuomintang conscription of
carts'.
125
Without carts the autumn harvest could not be moved; without
122
Tung Shih-chin, 'K'ang-chan i-lai Ssu-ch'uan chih nung-yeh' (Agriculture
in
Szechwan since
the beginning
of
the war
of
resistance), Ssu-cb'uan cbing-cbi cbi-k'an, I.I (15 Feb. 1943) 48.
•"
Ibid.
51.
124
Wang Yin-yuan, 'Ssu-ch'uan chan-shih nung-kung wen-t'i' (The problem
of
farm labour during
wartime
in
Szechwan), Ssu-ch'uan cbing-cbi cbi-k'an, 2.} (1945—4), 107-8.
125
Graham Peck, Two kinds
oj
time, 260.
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THE AGRARIAN CRISIS 269
carts fields could not be fertilized that winter; without carts farmers could
not ship their grain to market and buy what they needed. Another onerous
burden was the periodic grain levies, payable in kind of a fixed amount
by the entire village. Hardly a village was exempt. Although cities like
Chengchow and Loyang were occupied by the Japanese, life there seems
not to have been as harsh as it was for the farmers. Peck describes the
grim, rural conditions widespread in north-central China in the early
1940s.
Taxes and requisitions had become so heavy, the average fanner knew that if
the weather should get
a little
worse,
or if this plough would break, this ox should
die,
he would be in serious trouble. So many of
the
able-bodied young men had
been taken away as conscripts - nearly three-quarters of them in some villages
—
that most families could get along only if the old people, children and pregnant
women worked regularly in the fields.
126
In 1949 and 1950, Communist teams visited villages in the north to make
spot checks on the progress of land reform. They reported that, in every
village they visited, a great decline in the supply of livestock, tools,
cultivated area and crop yields had taken place between 1937 and 1949.
In P'ing-yuan county (Hopei), crop yields in 1949 were still below those
of 1937.
127
A survey of 49 villages in Shantung found that the cultivated
area per household in 1949-50 was below the 1931-6 average. The supply
of tools had also declined, and crop yields were lower.
128
The bleak picture of rural poverty that emerges from the historical
record for these years has been interpreted - contrary to our own views
set forth earlier in this chapter - by many commentators as evidence that
conditions had never been different, and that the countryside had never
experienced better times. Clearly, rural China paid a huge price for the
political and military disasters of these three decades.
126
Ibid.
312-13.
127
Chung-yang nung-yeh-pu chi-hua ssu, comp. Uang-moi-lai
ti
Cbtmg-kuo
nung-ts'un cbing-cbi tiao-cb'a
bm-pim
(A
collection
of
surveys
on the
Chinese form economy
in the
past
two
years), 149-50,
160-1.
12t
Ibid.
224-36.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER
6
PEASANT MOVEMENTS
The Chinese revolution is often considered the greatest peasant revolution
in history, even
the
very archetype
of
peasant revolution. Certainly
the
Chinese Communists could
not
have
won
power without
the
peasant
armies and the support of so many villagers. Yet without the Communists
the peasants would, quite simply, never have conceived
the
idea
of a
revolution.
To support this proposition the present chapter deals first with peasant
unrest that was spontaneous, contemporary with and yet independent
of
the Communist movement, and provoked by those three major drains on
peasant income, namely rent, interest
and
taxes.
1
A
second section
sketches a typology of rural disturbances in Republican China, after briefly
describing those which were not provoked by rent, usury or taxation. Both
the disturbances that
are
analysed
in the
first section and those alluded
to
in the
second section were eminently traditional flare-ups
of
peasant
anger,
as
ephemeral
as
they were sudden,
and
seldom
a
threat
to the
established order.
In
short, a huge distance lay between what the peasants
could
do
spontaneously and what
the
Communists made
it
possible
for
them
to do
under Communist leadership.
The
third section therefore
examines some
of the
difficulties that
the
Communists faced
and the
methods they used to overcome them. To forge victory for the revolution,
using the basic peasant material, was such
an
opportunity but also such
a challenge! Faithful
to
Lenin's teaching and example (never mind
if
the
peasantry rather than
the
workers constituted
the
basic material),
the
Chinese apostles of the revolution, who became specialists in the conquest
of power, took
up
that challenge
and
overcame
the
difficulties
by
dint
of
a
mixture of abnegation and cunning that aroused not only enthusiasm
but also resentment.
A preliminary warning must
be
given about statistics
on the
relative
frequencies
of the
various categories
of
rural disturbances
and
riots.
Statistical tables and percentages would provide only an illusory guarantee
1
See the
chart
in
Joel
S.
Migdal, Peasants, politics and revolution: pressures toward political and social
changes
in
tie
Third World,
89.
270
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