To understand China’s agricultural economy today it is important to comprehend the country’s history; yet few works have done so. The formation of the Republic of China in 1912 through the end of the War for Independence in 1949, the era of collectivization from 1949 through 1978, and the modern era from then on—these periods have all been characterized by distinct economic change. We cannot call them phases because by any measure the transformations were economic discontinuities. The warlord era following the fall of the Qing saw agriculture largely ignored until the 1921 famine that galvanized the China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC) to take action on its own account and initiate reforms in infrastructure, irrigation, wells, cooperation, and credit. It was not until 1928 or 1929 that the Nanjing government, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, started to promote agricultural reconstruction, but the inequities up to this point—particularly with respect to land tenancy—provided a foothold for Chinese communists under Mao Zedong and Zhu De. Despite the great floods and annexation of Manchuria in 1931, and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the efforts of reconstruction continued, but ultimately could not withstand the forces of change brought about by the prolonged costs of the Second World War, the beginning of the War for Independence, the collapse of the national Chinese currency, and the defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT).

The second era of the twentieth century (1950–1978), this brought about a period of collectivization in which land ownership was abolished in favor of large, state-run cooperatives. This period saw the troubling Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962, during which resources were drawn away from agriculture, and then the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. The third era of the twentieth century (1978–2015) began with the household responsibility system in 1978 in which previously collectivized farms were broken down into small household units of perhaps one acre per family, and more progressive reforms, in terms of access to credit, market development, infrastructure development, mechanization, and so on, were put in place. Writing now in the fall of 2018, at a time which has seen new reforms to urbanization, land tenancy, and the formalization of land transfer centers and mortgaging, China is perhaps on the cusp of a fourth era starting with land reforms around 2015 leading to an era of agricultural commercialization and expansion.

The inspiration for this book is John Lossing Buck’s 1937 volumes of Land Utilization in China, which are based on a large national survey of China’s agricultural economy between 1929 and 1933. What Buck provides is an in-depth assessment of agricultural conditions and land use at a specific moment in time. Japanese data employed by Huang and Myers between 1935 and 1942, and the various surveys conducted by Buck in the development of Chinese Farm Economy in 1930, provide similar snapshots. The agricultural economist’s job is to make sense of this data to determine the state of affairs with regard to general welfare and to decide what lessons might be learned to aid in the understanding of certain theories and, through that process, provide insights into effective policy. So, one side of the economist’s task is to analyze data with regard to theory to see what emerges and describe it in the context of the time frame recorded. Another task is to place the economic conditions in a broader historical context. In the case of China, the evolutionary studies of Perkins and Elvin show how difficult that task is when data is so sparing. Another angle is how the economist should absorb the data and through what lens. Huang and Fei, for example, are anthropologists and examine economy via the local ecology, recording as they go how things such as social networks and kinship, community and culture might deviate from the neoclassical economic model. Huang introduces the notion of “involution” to describe certain economic behaviors of the peasant class that would appear absurd to some classical economists, while attaching classical economic profit optimization to the managerial class—two economically distinct cohorts at the same moment in time applying different sets of economic rules, each in the preservation of self-interest. The economist’s task is to make sense of all this, not only in the moment, but in the broader frame of historical and future economic progression.

In the preparation of this volume we have been fortunate. After the 1937 publication of Buck’s Land Utilization in China, it was thought that the actual household records were lost to the Second World War, but around the year 2000 they were discovered in the archives at Nanjing Agricultural University (NJAU). Starting in 2002 (and ongoing), the actual household records from the survey were copied, preserved, catalogued, digitized, and verified. This book draws upon these data. In this chapter I attempt to place Buck’s work in a broader perspective. The microeconomic scope of each of the analytical chapters stand in context on their own. Here, I have elected to position the work in terms of equilibrium traps, of which involution may play a part, and see where this leads us.

Core to this book is the discovery of Professor John Lossing Buck’s discovery of the original survey spreadsheets used to compile Land Utilization in China (see Chap. 2). Which were stored, unnoticed in the archives of NJAU, scholars and students have spent nearly 18 years preserving, documenting, and finally digitizing the data for use in economic analysis. That is where this book comes in. The original three volumes of Land Utilization in China were compiled largely by abacus. The reconstructed microdata now permits investigation using sophisticated econometric and statistical techniques, not available at the time. The specific details of Buck’s life in China need not be detailed here except to say that as an agricultural missionary with an agricultural degree from Cornell University, Buck arrived in China in 1915. Two years later he married the Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, and in 1921 they moved to Nanjing where he took up a professorship, with the task of establishing a program in agricultural economics. Over the years Buck conducted a number of farm surveys with the aim of determining household incomes, profits, productivity, land tenure, and so on. Earning an MS degree in agricultural economics along the way, these studies were compiled into his first book, Chinese Farm Economy , which was also used to satisfy the requirements for his PhD from Cornell in 1933. It was toward the end of this work that he was approached to make a much broader and systematic study of land use in China. This led to the publication of Land Utilization in China in 1937. An extensive study, it included 16,786 farms in 168 localities across 22 provinces, providing intricate detail on climate, land, crops, livestock, fertility, farm business, farm labor, prices and taxation, marketing, population, nutrition, and standards of living. Even today, Buck’s book stands out as a standard reference of conditions on the ground in China.

Our book, we believe, complements other great works on Chinese agriculture. The first of these, by R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, in 1932, notes that “the Chinese peasant is, by general agreement, a highly skilled farmer, who has achieved, in certain branches of his art, an extraordinary efficiency. But the centuries of tradition which have perfected his technique have also narrowed it” (pp. 51–52). Tawney, drawing from multiple sources, including some of Buck’s earlier works, noted that most farmers were semi-subsistent, with about 47% of crops grown consumed on the farm (generally the lower-quality and valued grains such as kaoliang), while 53% were disposed of beyond the farm, usually at low harvest prices. Although no data on credit was available to Tawney at the time of his writing, he noted that, observationally, indebtedness was extensive and often crushing. As the next harvest approached, savings and food stores were so depleted that the farmer was forced to borrow locally at usury rates to survive, and with the weight of credit upon him, a forced sale at harvest was required to free him from the burden. By 1930, efforts were underway to develop credit cooperatives and societies—with Buck playing a significant role—and to establish agricultural banks including the Farmers Bank of China (Fu and Turvey 2018), but these efforts were on a rudimentary scale in the 1929–1933 period.

Tawney viewed the land tenancy issue as less of an economic issue than credit. In the absence of a landed gentry, as observed in the feudal politic of Europe, the dominant form of contractual arrangement between a landlord and tenant was relatively formal, and if the Chinese farmer were...