The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2

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PEASANT MOVEMENTS 27

of accuracy on account of the heterogeneity of the sources and the extreme

variability of the details that they contain. For example, during the

Nanking decade, of close to a thousand incidents recorded or simply

mentioned, barely one hundred can be described in accurate detail on the

basis of the information available, which varies from a few lines to a few

pages or at most a few dozen pages. The rest of these 1,000 incidents are

known to us all too cursorily from no more than one or two lines in a

summary

or, worse still, in the majority of cases from general references

that provide no details at all.

Moreover, some incidents recorded

separately in one or another record may be connected with the same affair.

This would seem to be true for most of the twenty instances of resistance

to tax-collection recorded in Soochow prefecture (Kiangsu) during the

first half of 1936. Should each be considered separately?

Again, at what

point (duration, numbers involved, level of violence) can an expression

of peasant anger be considered to be a riot? And when does a riot become

an uprising? In other words, we must recognize the uneven levels of

importance of the incidents recorded.

For these reasons, the credibility of any statistical assessment would

in any event be compromised by the disparate nature of the information

Cf. Chang Yu-i, comp.

Cbimg-kuo cbin-tai nung-yeb sbib

t^u-liao,

ti-san

cbi,

1927-19}?

(Materials on

China's modern agricultural history, third collection, 1927-1937), sometimes cited under the name

of Li Wen-chih, the compiler of the first volume, which covers the period 1840—1911, hereafter

NYTL,

3: 26 cases of resistance to land tax or to rent (3.1021—3), 24 disturbances connected

with the salt tax or committed by salt producers

(ibid.

1023—;), 21 disputes relating to water

and to waterworks

{ibid.

1026-8), 6 relating to the land

(ibid.

1026) and,

finally,

27 cases of looting

(ibid.

1031—2). Cf. also 43 disturbances relating to salt, all of which took place in the single year

1934

(Cbung-buajib-pao,

4 April

1935) and

more than

100

incidents relating to six other categories

that took place in that same year (Cbtmg-bua jib-poo, 17 February; 6, 13, 20, 27 March; 18 and

25 April 1935). Another drawback to these tables is that the information that they contain, sparse

though it is, sometimes suggests that one should distrust or even reject the classification of a

particular incident or riot.

E.g. 25 cases of looting in Wu-hsihsien, Kiangsu, between

May and

June 1932; and 40-odd

cases within two weeks (between 2j July and 8 August 1934) in the

cben

of Wang-tien alone

(in Chia-hsing

hsien,

north-east Chekiang). See respectively, Feng Ho-fa,

ed.

Cbimg-kuo nung-f/un

ebing-cbi

t^u-liao

(Materials on the Chinese rural economy), hereafter

NTCC,

1.423; United States,

State Department Archives, hereafter USDS, 893.006/1070, enclosure 5; also 70 fiscal riots in

the province of Shensi alone during the summer of 1932 (NTCC 2.413); 197 incidents involving

tenant-farmers, mostly in Kiangsu and Chekiang between 1923 and 1932, that is to say, spanning

the Nanking decade and the preceding decade: Ts'ai Shu-pang, 'Chin shih-nien lai Chung-kuo

tien-nung feng-ch'ao ti yen-chiu' (Research on tenant riots in China during the past ten years),

Tung-fang

tsa-cbib,

hereafter

TFTC,

30.10 (16 May 1933) 26-38. Account should also be taken of

looting and other incidents of minor importance, the frequency of which is almost impossible

to gauge since the sources do no more than indicate that they

are'

very

numerous

or even' almost

daily events' in particular periods and localities, for example in the silkworm-producing zone

of Chekiang and Kiangsu in May and June 1932 (NYTL 3.1030). The 40 cases in Wang-tien

and the 2

in Wu-hsi mentioned above confirm

their'

almost daily'

nature;

and the latter represent

only a minority of the cases of looting in the hsien between 11 May and 10 June 1932; the vast

majority of cases were not reported in the newspapers and were therefore not recorded (NTCC

1.423).

NYTL 3.1021—2. On this Soochow case, see below, pp. 273—5.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

272 PEASANT MOVEMENTS

provided by the sources, while a statistical assessment which drew

comparisons between things not comparable (disturbances of widely

varying kinds, duration or importance) might well prove to be lacking

in any significance at all.

One last point of methodology: the sample of rural disturbances known

to us is not very representative of the frequency of such disturbances over

a longer period of time and not at all representative of their spatial

distribution. Should we, for example, attribute the increase in the number

of anti-fiscal riots, recorded from the twenties to the thirties, to the

increase in land tax coupled with the decrease in agricultural prices (and

hence also in the income of those taxed) or should we attribute it rather

to a greater interest in the condition of the peasantry shown by witnesses

(journalists and other intellectuals)? (Perhaps the answer is both, but then

in what proportion?) As many of these witnesses were writing in Shanghai

newspapers, the overwhelming majority of the incidents known to us took

place in Kiangnan (south of Kiangsu) and northern Chekiang.

Provinces

of the interior, particularly those in the west, are under-reported; and in

those provinces, prefectures and hsien most distant from the provincial

capital, even more so.

A statistical analysis has been drawn up by C. K. Yang, not for the

Republican period but for the nineteenth century (1796—1911).

For that

relatively long period of

time,

his study has a much wider scope (not only

rural disturbances but also the much more numerous urban riots and

clashes, acts of banditry, and collective donations made to help the

government meet its military expenses, not to mention 1,600 incidents

connected with the rebellions of

the

Taiping and the Nien). For historians

of the Republican period, to put together annual totals comparable to the

6,643 incidents and mass actions (that is, 58 per year) analysed by

C. K. Yang would not be impossible. It would, however, be desirable to

reach less uncertain and in some cases less tautological conclusions. There

is a striking contrast between the modest and controversial results of his

ambitious project

on the one hand, and the very valuable findings of his

classic works on the family, the village and religion, on the other.

Equally

eloquent is the contrast between the disappointing results of the

One

compiler remarks, quite justifiably, that

the

record number

cases

looting

these

two

provinces reputed

to be 'the

paradise' (fien-fang)

China indicates

more than

the

superiority

the

press

Kiangsu

and

Chekiang over

the

press

other provinces (NYTL, 3.10)2).

C. K.

Yang,

Some preliminary statistical patterns

mass actions

nineteenth-century China',

in Frederic Wakeman,

Jr. and

Carolyn Grant,

eds.

Conflict

and

Control

late imperial China,

174-» 10.

'It

attempts

use computer-processed historical data as a heuristic tool

discern

the

magnitudes

and configurations

mass action incidents

...',

Yang,

Statistical patterns',

174 and

C. K.

Yang,

The

Chinese

family

in the

Communist revolution;

Chinese village

early Communist

transition; Religion

Chinese Society.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

RESISTANCE TO RENTS AND TAXES 273

'ecological' study made by Roy Hofheinz and the massive store of

information provided by that historian from his more traditional

research.

Of course, the qualitative methods favoured in the present

chapter are themselves open to obvious hazards such as subjectivism, but

they at least do not present an appearance of scientifically established truth

which may be quite misleading.

SPONTANEOUS RESISTANCE TO RENTS AND TAXES

Conflicts

between

tenants and

landlords

ICang-tsu

(resistance to land rents) is a privileged category among the

non-Communist peasant actions recorded in the People's Republic of

China, because it best represents the struggle of the exploited against the

exploiters. Sometimes alone, sometimes preceding the more fully

documented but socially less pure category of

k'ang-shui

(movements of

resistance to taxes), it figures fairly prominently in archives and compila-

tions,

a fact which can lead to exaggeration of the insubordination of

tenant-farmers. This insubordination increased in the Republican period

but remained confined to

minority and caused disputes and confrontations

more than real riots.

Among the real riots it is worth noting the one that disturbed the

countryside round Soochow during the winter and spring of

193

5-6. The

numerous absentee landlords there, some of whom did not even know

where their fields lay, and also some resident landlords, had acquired the

habit of entrusting the collection of rents to middlemen, the

ts'ui-cbia

(rent-collectors), who were detested both for their corruption and for their

exactions.

However, the institution of the

ts'ui-chia,

which was already

old, was not the only cause of the revolt. The agitation followed two

consecutive bad harvests. For reasons of economy, the landlords decided

in 1935 not to send to the scene 'calamity inspectors' entrusted with the

task of judging the size of the disaster, particularly as the tenant-farmers

had fought with those they had sent the previous year. The hsien

' Roy Hofheinz, Jr. "The ecology of Chinese Communist success: rural influence patterns,

1925-1945' in A. D. Barnett, ed.

Chinese Communist politics

action,

$-77; Tie

broken

wave:

The

Chinese

Communist

peasant

movement,

22-192!;

'Peasant movement and rural revolution: Chinese

Communists in the countryside, 1925-1927' (Harvard University, Ph.D. dissertation, 1966).

On the

tfui-cbia

of Soochow, see Yuji Muramatsu, 'A documentary study of Chinese landlordism

in late Ch'ing and early Republican Kiangnan',

Bulletin of the School 0] Oriental and African

Studies,

29.5 (Oct. 1966) J69, 587-9; and Frank A. Lojewski, 'The Soochow bursaries: rent management

during the late Ch'ing',

CSWT,

4.5 (June 1980) 44-5. Note, however, that the incidents of

extortion for which the

t/ui-chia

are

blamed by the farmers of Soochow during the Nanking decade

appear to have been more frequent than those at the end of the Ch'ing; and furthermore, the

ts'ui-ibia

studied by Muramatsu and later by Lojewski were employees of the

tsu-cban

(landlord

bursaries), which was not necessarily the case during the Nanking decade.

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274 PEASANT MOVEMENTS

government had therefore asked all tenants to make 'declarations of

calamity', but the landlords suspected they were exaggerated, and so they

automatically reduced the totals of losses declared in their calculation of

the rent reductions to be permitted. There was a second reason for tenant

discontent, connected with the payment in kind of a rent expressed in

terms of money: just before the rents were fixed, the price of a picul of

rice in Soochow dropped from

yuan to 7.5 yuan, with the result that

tenants were obliged to hand over an extra sixteenth of rice for a rent

that remained nominally unchanged. A third reason for their anger was

an alteration in the weights and measures (the old picul now equalled 1.6

new piculs), which was misunderstood by the tenants, who wrongly

interpreted it as an increase in rent.

The trouble started in November 1935, in the villages and districts

where the harvest had been poorest, when the officials started trying to

collect rents and to arrest defaulting tenants. After the failure of

petition

requesting a rent reduction, several thousand peasants demanded the

liberation of the arrested tenants, besieged and destroyed the local police

station (the police opened fire and wounded a few demonstrators) and

set fire to the houses of the

ts'ui-chia.

Clashes and incidents (none of which

lasted more than two days) occurred again during the first few months

of 1936 in several districts

(cb'u)

of Wu-hsien (the hsien of Soochow). The

most serious of these took place at the end of April, a few days after the

officials had tried to seize seeds in lieu of unpaid rents. As a result of these

incidents, which caused deaths on both sides, the hsien magistrate tried

to restore calm by belated and limited concessions: a reduction of 20 per

cent in rents in districts where the harvest had been poorest, cancellation

of the fines imposed on tenants who had not paid their rent on time, and

so on. But clashes between peasants and police continued through May

and June.

The first characteristic of these Soochow riots was their lack of

preparation. The rebels do not appear to have had a strategy nor is there

any discernible progression in the forms taken by the resistance (protests,

petitions and propaganda alternated with violent clashes at the end of the

period just as at the beginning). What we have here, rather, is a series

of explosions which spread by contagion and with a markedly seasonal

character (at the time of rent-collection, then of sowing). Second, these

" See Hung Shui-chien, 'Su-chou k'ang-tsu feng-ch'ao ti ch'ien-yin hou-kuo' (Causes and results

of the tenant riots in Soochow),

Ti-cbengjiab-k'an

(Land administration monthly), 4.10 (October

1936) IJ47-62; 'Su-chou ti nung-ch'ao' (The peasant riots in Soochow),

Chung-kuo

mmg-tfim,

hereafter

CKNT,

2.6 (June 1936) 6-8;

Cb'm-pao,

29, December 1935, quoted in NYTL 3.1020.

On the October 1934 disturbances, during which tenants had set fire to more than 40 houses

belonging to

Is'ui-cbu,

see Wu Ta-k'un, 'Tsui-chin Su-chou ti nung-min nao-huang feng-ch'ao'

(The recent disturbances among Soochow peasants due to poor harvests), TFTC 32.2 (16 Jan.

•935) 85-4-

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RESISTANCE TO RENTS AND TAXES 275

explosions of fury were provoked by particular causes, even accidents:

' calamities' (a bad harvest) or the refusal of landlords to accept without

question the declarations of calamity, a local drop in the price of rice, a

change in the system of weights and measures. There was no fundamental

questioning of the principle of tenancy, simply a protest against sudden

changes in the status quo. Third and finally, in this conflict between

tenants and landlords, just as in anti-fiscal riots, as we shall see, people

attacked officials or underlings and public buildings. Heads of villages

or of

pao-chia

and the local offices of the public security forces were, like

the

ts'ui-chia,

the most frequent targets for violence - much more frequent

than the landlords themselves, who were not all absentees. The tenants

were angry that the soldiery should come right into the villages to collect

unpaid rents. The troops intervened as a result of appeals for help,

complaints and sometimes disguised threats ('if we do not receive the

rents,

we shall be unable to pay our taxes') from the landlords. But the

anger aroused in the tenants by the collusion between the exploiters and

the authorities turned almost exclusively against the latter. Thus the

anti-rent disturbances, which are deemed social rebellions par

excellence,

were aimed less at the rich than at the authorities.

In at least one province, Chekiang, the solidarity between the authorities

and the landlords faltered momentarily. For a short period during the first

years of the Nationalist regime in Chekiang, the local representatives of

the KMT tried to defend the interests of the tenant farmers, a policy which

produced a multiplication of the conflicts between the latter and their

landlords. Thanks to this unfortunate episode (the failure of agrarian

reform in the only province where the authorities tried to apply it), we

have a considerable body of evidence to illustrate a second point

concerning the tenants' affairs: although riots and revolts were rare, the

same was not true of disputes and lawsuits. Though they seldom

degenerated into violence, they cast a glaring light on the nature of the

relations between landlords and tenants. With rare exceptions, the

landlords alone express their views but from their often prolix recrimina-

tions we can try to grasp the subjects of disagreement between the two

sides.

The government decision to reduce land rents by

per cent provoked

numerous complaints and petitions from the landlords, who are usually

reluctant to identify themselves as such and often sign themselves

'citizens'

(kung-miri),

or even bluntly 'farmers'

(yeh-nung)

or 'delegates of

the peasants in the canton'

(hsiang nung-min

tai-piao).

Some petitions claim

For the paragraphs that follow, tf. three files in the Second Historical Archives, Nanking: no.

1—2—1001 and i—2-1002, entitled 'Che-chiang ko-ti nung-min k'ang-tsu tou-cheng' (Peasant

resistance to rents in various localities in Chekiang) (1927—1930); no. 2-2—1129, 'Che-chiang

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

276 PEASANT MOVEMENTS

to have several hundred signatures, among which there must certainly

be those of landlords' agents, relatives and clients, since the number of

landlords in the district was likely to be lower than the number of

petitioners. Others, on the other hand, bear only the signatures of the

usual spokesmen of the local elite (head and sub-head of the district,

commander of the militia,

etc.).

But what varies hardly at all is the content

of the petitions; identical arguments expressed in the same terms and using

the same cliches, as if models had been passed around (just as they were

for the fabrication of the

'cahiers de

doleances'

or lists of grievances before

the meeting of the States General in France in the spring of 1789). We

are obviously dealing here with a concerted offensive, or rather

counter-offensive.

In their complaints, the Chekiang landowners are careful not to call

into question the principle of a

2 5

per cent rent reduction. They simply

claim that this measure is responsible for the deterioration in relations

between landlords and tenants; the worst elements among the latter

—

' swindler-tenants'

{chien-tien)

and ' bad peasants'

(o-tiutig)

- are taking

advantage of the law and applying a reduction of much more than 2 5 per

cent, or even quite simply refusing to pay up at all. Bad tenants are often

manipulated by hoodlums (p'i-t'u) or vagabonds

(tvu-yehyu-min,'

vagabonds

without regular occupation') and supported by traditional or (more often)

newly established leaders and organizational bodies: the village heads and

village committees, the peasant unions and the local sections of the

Kuomintang.

The landlords particularly resent the arbitration committees

(Jien-yeh

chung ts'ai-hui)

which are responsible for settling the litigations that stem

from the application of the law: they accuse them of systematic partiality

in favour of the tenants and of brutality and intimidation towards the

landlords. They suggest that these arbitration committees (also known

as 'conciliation committees') are inciting the tenants to refuse to accept

harvest inspections and instead to submit their own evaluations or even

to use for the excellent year of 1950 grain harvests figures which were

those of the poor harvests in 1929 and 1928; the committees are

encouraging the tenant farmers to use smaller measuring units when they

pay rent in grain; and not to pay their rent until the landlord has drawn

up a new lease for them, etc. Deprived in this way of their legitimate

ko-hsien ch'eng-ch'ing ch'u-hsiao shih-hsing er-wu chien-tsu i-mien chiu-fen' (Petitions from

various hsiens of Chekiang requesting that the 25 per cent rent reduction be no longer applied

in order to avoid conflicts) (Nov. 1931

—

June 1934); and Noel R. Miner, 'Agrarian reform in

Nationalist China: the case of rent reduction in Chekiang, 1927-1937', in F. Gilbert Chan, ed.

China at the crossroads: Nationalists and Communists,

1927—1049,

69—89. I am grateful for the help

extended to me by Mr Sun Xiufu and the staff of the Second Historical Archives.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

RESISTANCE TO RENTS AND TAXES 277

profits, the landowners of a province once prosperous but now ruined can

no longer acquit their fiscal obligations: it is often with a veiled threat

of this kind aimed in the direction of the authorities that they conclude

their litany of complaints and lamentations.

Some of the official documents preserved in the Nanking archives,

originating in local sections of the Kuomintang or even the provincial

government, refute the allegations contained in a number of these

landlords' petitions, point by point. However, their recriminations are

not all totally unfounded. Quite a few tenants, who did not fully

understand the stipulations of the new law, and others, who were quite

simply making the most of a favourable political situation, took the course

of not paying any rent at all. Some landlords were threatened or robbed

or beaten, a few were killed. But these acts generally seem aimed against

landlords who refuse to apply the rent reduction or who reassume

possession of the land so as to cultivate it themselves or else rent it to a

more submissive tenant (a course sanctioned by local custom only in cases

where the tenant farmer has been a serious defaulter). Indeed the

obstructive tactics of many landlords originally prompted the directives

concerning the introduction of new leases: the old leases were declared

null and void, the only valid ones now to be those that observed the

2 5

per cent rent reduction. Complaints about measuring units that were ' too

small' were matched by just as many, on the part of tenant farmers or

the administration, about landlords using measures that were 'too big'.

It was, precisely, to prevent fraudulent practices that the conciliation

committees were driven to impose their own measuring units. In a similar

fashion they also forbade tenants to dampen the rice used to pay rent in

kind, in order to make it heavier.

Two lessons can be learned from the resurgence of friction and conflict

provoked by rent reduction. The first is that the resistance of the

privileged class proved successful. The threat of a tax strike prompted

the provincial government, which needed the money and cooperation of

the landowners so as to be able to cary though its other projects, to give

up its programme of agrarian reform. The second lesson to be learned

from the agitation provoked by rent reform in Chekiang is that it released

frustrations that had been accumulating over a long period. The tenants

did not take the initiative in calling into question the contracts that bound

them to their landlords, but once the authorities introduced a new

measure, it was a catalyst.

Most of the subjects of dispute between tenants and landlords in

Chekiang are also naturally to be found in the rest of the country. The

most frequent conflicts are connected with the amount of rents or rent

278 PEASANT MOVEMENTS

deposits, which the landlord either increases (for example, because his

own taxes have risen) or refuses to lower (or lower as much as the tenant

wants him to) when the harvest is poor. But there are so many other

conflicts of interest that it is impossible to list them all: farmers being

evicted, disputes over calculating the size of the harvests or over the

measures employed, excessive strictness or brutality on the part of the

rent-collectors, etc. Tenants sometimes accuse the agent of an absentee

landlord of demanding a '

little

deposit' for himself on top of the big one

that is required for the landlord. They also reproach the agent with

charging a commission or a bribe for recommending a candidate for a

tenancy when a vacancy occurs. As for the landlords, their complaints

concern first and foremost delay in payments or refusals to pay (in reality

usually inability to pay), but

also,

sometimes, the illicit use of some source

of water or the secret felling of bamboos.

Many altercations are caused by a third party: the heavens. Most of the

requests for rent reductions are presented in years of poor harvest. An

inquiry concerning the hinterland of Shanghai cites 220 causes of incidents

connected with rent. Apart from 15 refusals to reduce the rent in years of

poor harvests, there were 39 incidents caused by meteorological vagaries

(flooding: 24 cases; destruction caused by high winds: 8 cases; drought:

7 cases) and 23 caused by devastation by locusts.

Here we may stress

two points: (1) the role played by factors that are 'accidental' (even if

recurrent) in provoking incidents connected with rents; (2) the general

predominance in these conflicts of disputes over particular points. The

principle of paying rent is almost never called into question.

During the twenties and thirties these conflicts do seem to become

slightly more frequent and intense. The inquiry mentioned above records

for the decade 1922—31 from two Shanghai newspapers (the

Shen-pao

and

the

Hsin-wen-pao)

a total of 197 incidents connected with rent.

During

the first three years (1922-4), the number of recorded incidents varies

between 9 and 11 each year. During the next three years, the troubled

years of 1925—7, the number swings between 17 and 19 each year. From

1928 on, it never went below 20. Thus there appears to be a slight

intensification of agitation. Moreover the proportion of violent acts (such

as invading the home of the landowner and killing and eating his pigs)

and of riots and revolts tends to rise: from

3 3

per cent of the incidents

recorded over the first five years (1922-6) to 39 per cent of those recorded

over the last five years (1927-31).

Hsiao Hsin-i,'Iiconomieet societe rurale du Sichuan (Szechwan)de 192731945' (ficole Pratique

des Hautes litudes, Paris, Ph.D. dissertation, 1972) 96—7.

Ts'ai Shu-pang, 'Chin shih-nien lai Chung-kuo tien-nung feng-ch'ao ti yen-chiu', 36.

Ibid.

26-38. The compilation noted only 197 incidents for 220 causes of incidents since some

incidents resulted from several causes at once.

RESISTANCE TO RENTS AND TAXES 279

All the same, that is not a spectacular change! Considerably more

significant are the annual fluctuations that occur: 46 (23.35 per cent) of

the total number of incidents occur in 1929, a catastrophic year (with a

plague of locusts and drought at the beginning of the season and flooding

later on), as against no more than 20 during the excellent year of 1930.

Taking the riots alone, the correlation between climatic accidents and

agitation is even clearer: 18 riots in 1929 (out of a total of

for the whole

decade, i.e. almost one quarter) and only 4 in 1930. As for the incidents

that are not riots, many continue to take traditional forms: demonstrations,

petitions, lawsuits and cases where tenants have run away so as to avoid

paying rent account for more than half the cases recorded. All in all, the

traditional character of the incidents connected with rent and an equally

traditional link between poor harvests and agitation seem more significant

than the slight increase in the frequency of incidents. At all events, revolts

remain extremely rare.

The norm in China under the Kuomintang remained submission to

landlords.

They were treated with deference and continued to practise

reciprocity

(kan-ch'ing)

in an atmosphere strongly tinged with Confucian

paternalism. Class consciousness and solidarity among exploited tenants

are less common and less passionate than competitiveness among

candidates for tenancies. The scarcity of land and demographic growth

play into the hands of the landowners. For farmers the best course is to

acquire the reputation of a tenant who makes no trouble, so as not to

risk being evicted from one's tenancy. Even when the tenants do revolt,

the targets of their destructive acts are, as we have seen, more often public

offices and buildings than the houses of the '

lords',

and their fury is more

often unleashed against the police who come along to support the

rent-collectors than against the landlords who have requested them to do

so.

The local moneylender appears to benefit from the same circumstance

for he too is on the whole spared by the debtors upon whom he exerts

pressure. He certainly runs the risk of being massacred once the people

have risen up for

other reasons

but, outside militant literature, one hardly

ever comes across concerted movements directed specifically against a

grasping moneylender.

Rather, the infrequent riots usually take place

when employees or other creditors come to a village to claim their dues:

Note the interesting evidence of the Japanese widow of

large landowner in Szechwan: Vincent

S. P. Brandt, 'Landlord-tenant relations in Republican China',

Papers

China,

17 (1963) 225-6.

E.g., with the complicity of

his

debtors, bandits rob a moneylender, burn the IOUs and distribute

his wealth to the poor:

Wen-cbijueb-k'an,

2.1 (1 Dec. 1936), cited in Chang Jyh-er, 'La vie des

paysans a travers la littcracurc chinoise contemporaine' (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences

Sociales, Paris, Ph.D. dissertation, 1976).

Shansi

1954. See Donald Gillin, Warlord: Yen Hsi-sban in Sbansi province, /p/i-zpip, 158.

28O PEASANT MOVEMENTS

riots in this category are comparable to those provoked by the collection

of rents or taxes. But as a general rule, the situation is one of a simple

bilateral relationship between two individuals or two families, that is to

say, between a single debtor, on his own, and his creditor, a creditor to

whom, even if he is a moneylender practising usury, it will surely be

necessary to turn again at some future date. The point is that the necessity

of borrowing overrides every other consideration. There are hardly any

revolts against intractable creditors whereas there are some instances

where neighbours with reserves of funds but who refuse to lend them,

in times of penury or when pre-harvest loans are needed, are attacked or

even killed.

More often it is a matter of compelling the wealthy to

advance two or three piculs of rice to tide one over until the harvest.

The necessity of borrowing, which sometimes leads to violence, at the

same time makes it imperative to deal circumspectly with the lender. There

is one act that symbolizes the dependence felt with regard to this figure

(and also the quasi non-existence of any movement of debtors or, a fortiori,

of any revolt by the insolvent): one of the most popular ways to take

revenge upon a pitiless creditor is to commit suicide before his door.

Shylock loses face, his censor his life.

Anti-fiscal agitation

far the most fertile and important source of riots was official extortion

in connection with tax collection.'

That characteristic of traditional

peasant agitation in late Ch'ing China, as well as in seventeenth-century

France,

was still true during the Nanking decade of Republican China.

As examples, let us cite two anti-fiscal riots which took place during

the same month (October 1932) and in the same region, although it is

not possible to establish the slightest contagion between them. A fiscal

investigation

(ch'ing-ch'a

t'ien-fu)

ordered by the Department of Finance

of the Kiangsu provincial government provoked serious disturbances in

the western cantons

(bsiang)

of Chiang-tu hsien in the neighbourhood of

the town of Yang-chou. This inquiry disclosed that the area of many

agricultural plots was greater than declared on the title-deeds. The

administration gave the farmers concerned the option of either buying

This

what happened

to a

peasant

Ching-an, Kiangsi,

who was

killed

members

of his

dan {Sben-pao,

May 1930, cited

NYTL 3.1029).

This

the enforced loan {ying-cbitb) described

Feng Ho-fe, NTCC

1.427.

Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: imperial control in the

nineteenth

century, 441.

This feature is stressed by all students of peasant revolts in France during the seventeenth century,

are reminded

Jean Jacquart: 'Les paysanneries

l'epreuve',

Pierre Deyon and Jean

Jacquart, eds.

Les

hesitations de la

croissance

ijSo-i?jo, vol.

2 of

Histoire

iconomiquc

sociale

monde,

489.