The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988

by Philip C.C. Huang

How can we account for the durability of subsistence farming in China despite six centuries of vigorous commercialization from 1350 to 1950 and three decades of collectivization between 1950 to 1980? Why did the Chinese rural economy not undergo the transformation predicted by the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx? In attempting to answer this question, scholars have generally treated commercialization and collectivization as distinct from population increase, the other great rural change of the past six centuries. This book breaks new ground in arguing that in the Yangzi delta, China's most advanced agricultural region, population increase was what drove commercialization and collectivization, even as it was made possible by them. The processes at work, which the author terms involutionary commercialization and involutionary growth, entailed ever-increasing labor input per unit of land, resulting in expanded total output but diminishing marginal returns per workday. In the Ming-Qing period, involution usually meant a switch to more labor-intensive cash crops and low-return household sidelines. In post-revolutionary China, it typically meant greatly intensified crop production. Stagnant or declining returns per workday were absorbed first by the family production unit and then by the collective. The true significance of the 1980's reforms, the author argues, lies in the diversion of labour from farming to rural industries and profitable sidelines and the first increases for centuries in productivity and income per workday. With these changes have come a measure of rural prosperity and the genuine possibility of transformative rural development. By reconstructing Ming-Qing agricultural history and drawing on twentieth-century ethnographic data and his own field investigations, the author brings his large themes down to the level of individual peasant households. Like his acclaimed The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985), this study is noteworthy for both its empirical richness and its theoretical sweep, but it goes well beyond the earlier work in its inter-regional comparisons and its use of the pre- and post-1949 periods to illuminate each other.

Genres: History, China

421 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Philip Huang is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 2 out of 5]

An economic history of the peasant economy in the Yangzi Delta of China from the 14th-20th century. Huang argues that the peasant economy was based on subsistence living and a property system known as “feudal landlordism.” As such, it resisted becoming either capitalist or socialist but found a third way until collectivism was forced on the region by Maoism in the 1950s. His argument is framed around three patterns of agrarian economic change: intensification, involution, and development. Most of the Yangzi Delta economic history is bound in a static mode of involution, that is, total output expands but at the cost of diminishing marginal returns. This cycle perpetuated because of excessive familial labor.

This book is a dense economic tome. It does a good job of analyzing statistical evidence of economic activity compared to the economic theories of capitalism and socialism. This book is only for devotees of the history of economic thought as a solid case study.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

a thorough analysis brought down by unnecessary anti-marxism / liberal ideology