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Studies of the role of land tenure in the economic and social history of China are flawed by the unexamined assumption that the sale of land by impoverished farmers was the only process that generated high rates of tenancy and concentration of ownership of land. Debt-sales are assumed to occur as part of a cycle of immiserization in which a peasant population outgrows its landed resources and owner-farmers are forced to sell their lands and become the tenants or hired laborers of wealthy landlords. This essay demonstrates the improbability of such a scenario and establishes its opposite: that rates of tenancy and concentration of landownership rise, not in periods of economic decline but in periods of prosperity, and not through debt-sales but through the alternate processes of reclamation, migration, and changes in the mode of landlord farm management.

This department is devoted to shorter reports on research in the communications field. Readers are invited to submit summaries of investigative studies interesting for content, method or implications for further research. Contributions of 500 to 1,200 words are preferred.