IV. THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION
18. Land Ownership and Distribution
Although the city working class is the leader of the Chinese revolution, and has occupied the forefront of the stage, yet it is the peasantry, and the problem of the land, that forms the key to the Revolution in its present stage of development. The Chinese Revolution is now essentially an agrarian revolution.
The agrarian problem in China is so different in its forms from those in other lands, that a full understanding of it can only be gotten from long study. Only a limited material of scientific investigation is available. The most valuable is the investigation conducted by Michael Borodin, which will be the principal basis of an extended study on the peasant problem which I will publish soon. In the meantime, this pamphlet would not be complete without giving at least the main outlines of the position of the peasantry, and the importance of the land problem in the Revolution.
Private and absolute ownership of land is the basis of the Chinese landholding system. Socalled public lands are largely based upon private ownership (by family, clan, etc.).
A large proportion of the privately-owned land is in the hands of a relatively small class of landlords, who rent it to landless peasants. The socalled public land is also cultivated by landless peasants. Thus the preponderant element in agriculture is the tenant (varying in different provinces from 40% to 80%), and the agrarian question is dominated by the landlord-peasant relationship.
Peasant economics has been dragged under the influence of world markets, specialized cultivation, etc., but the social and legal relationships are still dominated by feudal and semi-feudal customs.
The unprogressive technic of agriculture, practically unchanged for thousands of years, produces an exceedingly
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