China's Crisis: The Class Pattern

Chapter 2

SOCIAL CHANGE came belatedly to China. That is why it is today a land of such deeply chiseled contrasts. It is forced by the pull of a whole world system to make the leap from wooden plow to tractor, from palanquin to airplane. Western imperialism forced the Celestial Empire to find its place in a terrestrial world that had already advanced materially beyond it. For China there was no chance of a gradual ascent nor the opportunity to pass through the stages of development that the dominant Western world had already left behind. Tardily forced to find a place in the main stream of world history, China had to make a mighty leap forward. It had to try to make in decades the changes the West had accomplished in centuries. This wrench could not occur without the most profound convulsions. Hence the turmoil, the speed, the scope, the depth, the explosive character of events in China during the last forty years.

To make the necessary changes, China had not only to break sharply with its past; it had to transform its present. Old and new fetters both had to be sundered. Imperialist penetration had introduced the most modern techniques in production, transport, communications, and finance, the tools of modern capitalism. Yet, by adapting to its own uses the merchants, landlords, officials, and militarists, imperialism helped perpetuate the precapitalist forms of Chinese social organization. Foreign-built factories and railroads were used to extract profits out of the backwardness that survived in China as a whole. By occupying all the strategic positions in Chinese economy and drawing off tribute for the benefit of principals abroad, the imperialist system stifled the "normal" or independent development Of China's resources that might have raised the standard of living of the Chinese people and secured for China a less unequal competitive pOsition in relation to the advanced West. The existence of the foreign "spheres of influence" prevented China from achieving any reasonable degree of internal coherence and unification. If the Chinese people were to raise themselves from intolerable poverty, productive forces had to be freed to grow. To begin with, the farmer had to regain a stake in his land and his toil; industrialization had to begin to provide a new and more mutually fruitful relationship between town and country; and the foreign grip on Chinese economic and political life had to be broken. These were the inseparable elements of the crisis in modern Chinese society. These were, and amid all the changes still are, the problems of the Chinese revolution.

The heaving events of the last two decades, the world economic crisis, the Japanese invasion, the Pacific war, the collapse of Japan, the civil war in China, and the onset of ruinous inflation brought the crisis in China to the climax that ended with Communist conquest of power in 1949. These events altered the foreign relationship to China, both politically and economically. Extraterritoriality and the other special privileges acquired in the last century were finally yielded in treaties signed during the war. The foreign economic role in China was likewise transformed by the wartime dislocations and the subsequent political changes. But the root problem is still the same one that drove China into revolutionary upheaval two decades ago. China has suffered from being a vast, overpopulated, backward country in a world that has stubbornly refused it an opportunity to come abreast. The intense pressure of the swollen population in the crowded river valleys has been a product not merely of technical backwardness but of a whole encrusted system of social relations in which that backwardness was preserved. The events of 1925-27, as well as all the more recent events, have their roots in the struggle of the Chinese peasant for survival.

As China entered upon its new period of revolutionary conflict after 1919, it was plain that any radical revision in Chinese life had to begin with restoring to the peasant his land and the product of his toil. Only in this way would the old landholding system be abolished. It was the indispensable first step in the eventual transformation of the whole rural economy and the increase of agricultural productivity in new forms and by new methods. More than three-quarters of China's population, or more than 300,000,000 people, depend upon the land for their livelihood. The problems of these millions are the problem of China. Their poverty is China's poverty. All of China's hopes for the future depend on releasing the productive energies of this great mass of people. Up to now they have been drained by a system which has taken away from them the fruits of their infinite toil as well as the land itself, and has given them nothing in return.

Chinese rural economy has been characterized by the following main features: (1) The increasingly swift concentration of land ownership in the hands of a constantly narrowing section of the population; (2) the passage of title in much of the land to absentee landlords, government officials, banks, and urban capitalists, who controlled the commercial capital penetrating to the remotest villages via the local merchants and usurers, and who were in turn dominated by foreign finance capital and the regime of the world market; (3) the dislocation and decline of agricultural production as a result of the uneconomic use of increasingly parcelized land, preservation of the most backward farming methods, the harsh impositions of the landlord, the usurer, and the state, exposure to the ravages of famine, flood, and drought, and civil wars fought by armies swollen by hordes of dispossessed peasants.

Scientific surveys made in recent years have destroyed the illusion, once so common, that China was a land of relatively comfortable small landholders. From sectional studies made under his direction, Professor Chen Han-seng estimated in 1936 that no less than 65 percent of the peasant population was either entirely landless or land hungry, i.e., possessing land in parcels too small and too burdened by all the adverse conditions of the regime to provide a living even on the barest subsistence level.1 Differences in land owned and tilled and in the labor applied or exploited on the land disclosed the deep cleavages within the peasant population.*

* Professor Chen defined these categories as follows: "When a peasant family is barely capable of self-support from the land, and in its agricultural labor is not directly exploited by, nor exploiting, others, we may say that such a family belongs to the class of middle peasants. The status of the middle peasants helps us to determine that of the other two classes of peasantry. When a peasant family hires one or more agricultural laborers by the day or by the season during busy times, to an extent exceeding in its total consumption of labor power that required by the average middle peasant family for self-support, or when the land which it cultivates surpasses in area the average of the land used by the middle peasant, we shall then classify this family as that of a rich peasant. Where we see families cultivating twice as much land as the middle peasants in their village, we safely classify them as those of rich peasants without further considering the labor relations. The poor peasants are comparatively easy to recognize. All peasant families whose number of cultivated mow (one mow is one-sixth of an English acre) falls below that of the middle peasants and whose members, besides living on the fruits of their own cultivation have to rely upon a wage income or some income of an auxiliary nature, belong to the poor peasants in general. Those poor peasants who do not cultivate any land, either of their own or leased, but hire themselves out, or who cultivate a mere patch of land but have to support themselves chiefly by selling their labor power in agriculture, are called hired agricultural laborers, but still belong to the peasantry." Agrarian Problems in Southernmost China (Shanghai, 1936), p. 8.

Conditions of land tenure provide the clearest mirror of class relations in agriculture. One official estimate made in 1927 held that 55 percent of the Chinese peasantry was entirely landless and 20 percent holders of inadequate land. It was calculated that 81 percent of the cultivable land was concentrated in the hands of 13 percent of the rural population.2 These figures have been in the main substantiated by later investigators. In the north, where individual landholders predominated, study of a sample district showed that although only 5 percent of the farming population consisted of landless tenants, 70 percent of the total held less than 30 percent of the cultivated land in average plots of 10.9 mow, or less than two acres. In another district, it was found that 65.2 percent of the population held 25.9 percent of the land in parcels of less than seven mow, or a fraction above an acre. Landlords and rich peasants, together comprising 11.7 percent of the farming population, held 43 percent of the land, and middle peasants held the rest.

In the far more densely populated Yangtze valley and in the south, where foreign influence had first been felt and where the commercialization of agriculture was more advanced, the disproportions were found to be much greater. In one district of Chekiang province, investigators found that 3 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the land. In Wusih, another district of Central China, 68.9 percent of the farming families owned only 14.2 percent of the land in individual average parcels of 1.4 mow, or less than a quarter of an acre. Landlords and rich peasants, 11.3 percent of the families, owned 65 percent of the land.3 A separate survey made in the southern province of Kwantung revealed that landowners in different sections of the province comprised 12 to 32 percent of the population, and tenants and agricultural laborers 68 to 88 percent. Of the poor peasants representing 64.3 percent of the population in one area, investigators found that 60.4 percent were landless. An average of all the districts studied showed that more than half the farming population owned no land. Of all the land tilled by the poor peasants, only 17.2 percent was owned and 82.8 was leased. The average area owned by a poor peasant family was found to be 0.87 mow and the average area cultivated, including leased land, 5.7 mow. The number of mow necessary to provide the barest subsistence for a peasant family was found, in different districts, to vary between six and ten, and twice that many for tenant farmers.

The invasion of the village by commercial capital and cheap manufactured commodities put an end to the peasant's old self-sufficiency. But because the country remained backward in communications and production techniques, the peasant could not adapt himself to the change. He was simply ruined by it. He had to produce for sale in order to exist, yet the smallness of his land and the primitive character of his farming made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to do this with much success. He not only could not produce enough to provide him with a surplus, but had to go into debt for fertilizer, for food to tide him over until harvest time, for seed, for the rental and use of implements. For these he mortgaged away not only his crop but his land, at rates of interest never lower than 30 percent and more often 60, 70, 80 percent and even higher. The crushing burden of taxes and the rapacious extortions of the militarists who came to rule over him drove the peasant more deeply into debt each successive year and placed him and his land at the mercy of the usurer and the tax collector 5 He was fleeced at will by the merchant because he could not ship his tiny crop to more distant markets and hope for a return. Crops were freely cornered and prices manipulated at the village level by the merchants. Invariably, new debts were all the peasant had to show at the end of a season's toil. They followed him into the next year and into the next generation. Losing his land, he became a tenant. To the landlord he had to surrender 40 to 70 percent of his crop and a substantial additional percentage, often in special dues, gifts, and obligations preserved from the dim feudal past, including the duty of free labor on special occasions fixed by ancient tradition.

Famines, floods, and droughts, against which he was defenceless, often cost him his crop, his land if he had any, and frequently his life. Even in the best years, however, he and his family lived on the edge of starvation. He was little better than a bonded slave to the landlord, the tax collector, the merchant, and the usurer.

This process, in its manifold aspects, plunged the great mass of the peasantry into chronic, unrelieved pauperism. Millions driven off the land begged, starved, took to banditry, or swelled the armies of the war lords. From the south they had streamed abroad, to the Americas, to Malaya, and to the Indies. From the north, they emigrated to the undeveloped lands of Manchuria. Millions of them clogged the cities and towns on the rivers and on the seaboard, an inexhaustible source of cheap manpower that the new infant industries could not absorb. Their labor was still cheaper than that of animals, and throughout the length and breadth of China men did the work of beasts of burden. More and more land was left untilled. China, one of the greatest agricultural countries, was compelled to begin importing foodstuffs in steadily increasing measure.7 The internal and external markets entered upon a disastrous decline. The whole economic structure rotted at its core.

Over the years these conditions erupted in violence that became chronic but remained localized. Such was the banditry that became epidemic in China in the years following the 1911 revolution. It was obvious that the rise of any new revolutionary banner would bring the peasants to their feet and marshal them, almost at a word, in any new effort to revise the conditions of their life. It was also obvious that any new political force which undertook to lead the peasant masses toward a new dispensation would have to undertake in the first place to relieve the peasants of their worst burdens and restore them to their land.

This did not mean that mere redivision and redistribution of the land was the final answer to peasant well-being. Parcelization of the land was already one of the basic ills of Chinese agrarian economy. Any revolutionary transformation of Chinese society would have to include a long-term and far-reaching program for increasing the efficiency of agricultural production in economically larger units making full use of modern farming methods and industrial organization. This is why in the most fundamental sense a peasant economy, with all it contains of the narrow and limited outlook of the small and isolated producer, comes into conflict with the demands of a more rationalized system of urban and rural production. This is why the process of change must necessarily be one of patient education, of experiment and example, and of gradual transformation based upon proved results. It is also the reason why, in the first instance, the conditions for such changes cannot be established until the peasant himself has overthrown the old system that keeps him in thrall. In a backward peasant society, it is impossible to think in terms of rational planning and modernization before the peasant has been helped to free himself from all the older bonds of social subjection and ignorance which hold him down. This is why, above all, these changes have to take place not in rural isolation but as part of a fundamental revision of the economy as a whole.

In China this meant, as we have stated, that the economy of the country as a whole had to be freed to develop in accordance with its own needs. Here it ran into the formidable barrier of foreign capital functioning not as fuel for the general welfare of the people but as a sluice for draining away the country's wealth. In the 1920's, foreign capital owned nearly half of the Chinese cotton industry, the largest industry in the country. It owned a third of the railways outright and held mortgages on the rest. It owned and operated more than half the shipping in Chinese waters and carried in its own bottoms nearly 80 percent of China's foreign and coastal trade. The drain of wealth was a steady one. China's adverse trade balance accumulated between 1912 and 1924 to a total of $1,500,000,000* and to twice that sum in the next ten years. Between 1902 and 1914, foreign investments in China doubled and in the next fifteen years doubled again, reaching an estimated total of $3,300,000,000 (U.S.). More than four-fifths of this sum was directly invested in transport and industrial enterprises and the rest in loans which converted the various Chinese governments into docile tools and preserved the foreign grip on internal and external revenues.8

To regain control of its own productive forces, then, China had to recapture this lost ground; it had to free itself from the political and economic control of the Western powers and Japan. It had to unify itself by cutting across the sectional rivalries perpetuated by rival militarist satrapies in the different foreign spheres of influence. Only in this way could internal peace be restored, the incubus of militarism removed, and the internal market freed to develop by its own momentum. To gain the strength needed to do this, China needed a political leadership that would galvanize the peasantry by opening the way to release from its burdens. The Chinese revolution, in short, had to be an anti-imperialist movement that inscribed the slogans of the agrarian revolt on its banners.

* Calculated in United States dollars at the then par rate, two to one.

How and by whom could this be done? The answer to this key question involves an estimate of the class forces and relationships as they existed at the time—and we speak now of the first years after the first World War—for each section of the population obviously stood in distinct and different relations to the land and to the foreign interests and each would enter the political arena with different objects in view. The peasantry itself, as history has abundantly proved, cannot function independently in the political arena. It is deeply cleft into layers with sharply conflicting economic interests. It is the most numerous, but also the most scattered and most backward section of the population. It is localized and limited, economically and psychologically. For these reasons the village has, in China as elsewhere, always been subject to the town. The peasantry has always been at the command of the urban class able to centralize, weld, control, whether in the economic process or in politics. Without the centripetal force of the city, around which rural economy must inevitably revolve, the peasant is helpless, especially the poorest peasant, the most exploited and the nearest to the soil. His own attempts to better his own lot, without the aid of or in defiance of the dominant city class, have almost invariably taken the form of isolated acts of violence without permanent issue.

This has been especially true in China, a land of impoverished millions, darkened by illiteracy and superstition, so divided sectionally that customs, habits, and the spoken language differ sharply from province to province, town to town, and even from village to village. China's great peasant wars, rising and falling at intervals through the centuries, had always ended in a restratification within the peasantry. The rebelling masses were usually taken in tow by a section of the ruling group which sought not a new society but a new dynasty. When the fighting was done, a new emperor sat on the Dragon Throne and the landlords rose anew. Only an urban ally capable of transforming all social relations could release the peasantry from this vicious historical circle, free it from its own exploiting minority in the countryside, and help it bridge the cultural gap separating town and country.

In Europe the bourgeois revolutions of two and three centuries before had played this historic role. The pattern had many variations, but in essence the rising capitalists of that time had to extend the rights of bourgeois property to the land and free labor from serfdom on the land in order to place it at the disposal of the newly rising industrial system. In France, England, and Holland, the most radical sections of the petty bourgeoisie came forward to help the peasantry break the bonds with which feudalism kept it chained to the soil and thus laid the foundations of the strong national bourgeois states. In twentieth-century China, however, a different social pattern in a different historic context imposed different solutions. The Chinese ruling class could not liberate the peasantry because, as a result of the peculiar conditions and belatedness of its growth, it was too organically tied to the exploitation of the peasantry. It has already been shown how this class rose, not as a distinctly urban grouping with a new economic stake, but out of the old ruling classes. Unlike the European burghers of the past, the urban men of property in China remained bound by a thousand links to the precapitalist or semifeudal system of exploitation on the land. The peasant was subject to the depredations of landlord, usurer, merchant, banker, war lord, tax collector, and local official. The interests of these groups fused and became the interlaced interests of the ruling class as a whole. Not uncommonly, the collector of rent, interest, feudal dues, and taxes, was one and the same person.

"Quite unlike the landlords in France sous l'ancien regime, the landlords in China are often quadrilateral beings," wrote Professor Chen Han-seng in a striking summary passage. "They are rent collectors, merchants, usurers, and administrative officers. Many land1ord-usurers are becoming landlord-merchants; many landlordmerchants are turning themselves into landlord-merchant-politicians. At the same time many merchants and politicians become also landlords. Landlords often possess breweries, oil mills and grain magazines. On the other hand, the owners of warehouses and groceries are mortgagees of land, and eventually its lords. It is a well-known fact that pawnshops and business stores of the landlords are in one way or another affiliated with banks of military and civil authorities.... While some big landlords practice usury as their chief profession, nearly all of them have something to do with it. Again, many landlords are military and civil officers."9

This was the real physiognomy of the Chinese ruling class and of the system through which it bore down upon the peasant. The fundamental relations that governed it were bourgeois in character. Feudalism in its classic form disappeared from China many centuries ago when land, the basic means of production, became alienable. The penetration of commercial capital into the village established there a predominantly capitalist economic structure which continued to bear many precapitalist features. Thus the landlord-merchant-banker-politician-tax collector derived his wealth from usury, market speculation, land mortgages, state taxes, industrial profits, and ground rent. At the same time, from the older sources of revenue imbedded in the social structure, he extracted tolls strongly feudal in character and origin: dues to the landlord in free labor and gifts, rent in kind, forced labor, military service, and "likin" or local customs taxes.

Under the molding pressure of imperialism, as we have seen, the most important section of the Chinese ruling class had also become brokers, once, twice, or thrice removed, for the operations of foreign or foreign-controlled capital, just as the war lords and their governments had been converted into pawns on the chessboard of inter-imperialist rivalries. NONV aspiring Chinese industrialists looked forward, certainly, to developing their own wealth. They began to seek a loosening of the foreign grip on the country. But the fact was that they still leaned heavily on their foreign rivals and derived much of their revenue from them. The gulf which separated them from the great mass of the people was far wider and less bridgeable than the antagonism between them and the foreigners. From the foreigners they could and would try to exact concessions, to demand and secure a larger share of the spoils. But they could not hope to satisfy the masses of the people without undermining themselves. Land could not be restored to the peasants without upsetting all existing property relations and destroying the economic foundations of the ruling class itself in town and country alike. This fundamental and inescapable fact predetermined the limits to which the propertied classes of China would go in the national-revolutionary movement that rose in the years following 1919.

But these were by no means the limits of the perspectives of the revolution in China. The same economic growth and circumstances which had stirred nationalist feeling among nascent Chinese industrialists after the first World War had also brought into being an urban working class which now also entered the political arena as a major participant. This section of the population was estimated in 1927 to consist of about 1,500,000 factory workers, about 1,750,000 other industrial workers (miners, seamen, railroad workers) still closely linked, socially and economically, to the mass of urban shopworkers and handicraftsmen, numbering more than 11,000,000.1° This new urban class was still raw and young. The first modern labor unions, as distinct from the older craft guilds, appeared in China only in 1918. Yet, barely a year later, workers were already intervening in the political life of the country, striking in support of nationalist students. Six years later, 1,000,000 Chinese workers participated in strikes, many of them directly political in character. Two years after that, Chinese unions counted 3,000,000 members and in Shanghai the workers carried out a victorious insurrection which placed political power within their grasp.

The existence of this class in Chinese society introduced a wholly new element and opened entirely new perspectives for the nationalist revolution. Unlike the city banker, industrialist, official, or moneylender, the Chinese worker had no stake in preserving the existing system of rural exploitation. On the contrary, he was a victim of that same system. In some ways, his close ties to the village represented a liability rather than an asset in a political sense. The typical Chinese worker was fresh from the ranks of the peasantry. His family was still possibly on the land somewhere, trying desperately to survive. He himself had come to the city because rural hardship had driven him there. The Chinese industrial worker had been physically severed from the land but he was psychologically still bound to it. His own dearest hope, usually, was to return to it. It was not impossible that the landlord who owned his family's land was his urban employer's father or uncle or cousin. But the Chinese worker, on the other hand, found himself able to come to grips with his problems in an entirely new way and with far greater power. Feeble as Chinese industry was, the specific gravity of the worker in it was still greater than that of the propertied class. The worker proved this by plunging swiftly and even decisively into political life. He became the newest and most significant among the political forces taking shape and getting into motion in the China of the early 1920's. He was not mature, either in the political or economic sense, but the situation into which he was thrust was maturely ripe for his intervention. The whole course of the oncoming revolution would be determined by the ability of the urban working class to assert its leadership over the mass of peasants in the countryside.

their infinite toil as well as the land itself, and has given them nothing in return.

Chinese rural economy has been characterized by the following main features: (1) The increasingly swift concentration of land ownership in the hands of a constantly narrowing section of the population; (2) the passage of title in much of the land to absentee landlords, government officials, banks, and urban capitalists, who controlled the commercial capital penetrating to the remotest villages via the local merchants and usurers, and who were in turn dominated by foreign finance capital and the regime of the world market; (3) the dislocation and decline of agricultural production as a result of the uneconomic use of increasingly parcelized land, preservation of the most backward farming methods, the harsh impositions of the landlord, the usurer, and the state, exposure to the ravages of famine, flood, and drought, and civil wars fought by armies swollen by hordes of dispossessed peasants.

Scientific surveys made in recent years have destroyed the illusion, once so common, that China was a land of relatively comfortable small landholders. From sectional studies made under his direction, Professor Chen Han-seng estimated in 1936 that no less than 65 percent of the peasant population was either entirely landless or land hungry, i.e., possessing land in parcels too small and too burdened by all the adverse conditions of the regime to provide a living even on the barest subsistence level.1 Differences in land owned and tilled and in the labor applied or exploited on the land disclosed the deep cleavages within the peasant population.*

* Professor Chen defined these categories as follows: "When a peasant family is barely capable of self-support from the land, and in its agricultural labor is not directly exploited by, nor exploiting, others, we may say that such a family belongs to the class of middle peasants. The status of the middle peasants helps us to determine that of the other two classes of peasantry. When a peasant family hires one or more agricultural laborers by the day or by the season during busy times, to an extent exceeding in its total consumption of labor power that required by the average middle peasant family for self-support, or when the land which it cultivates surpasses in area the average of the land used by the middle peasant, we shall then classify this family as that of a rich peasant. Where we see families cultivating twice as much land as the middle peasants in their village, we safely classify them as those of rich peasants without further considering the labor relations. The poor peasants are comparatively easy to recognize. All peasant families whose number of cultivated mow (one mow is one-sixth of an English acre) falls below that of the middle peasants and whose members, besides living on the fruits of their own cultivation have to rely upon a wage income or some income of an auxiliary nature, belong to the poor peasants in general. Those poor peasants who do not cultivate any land, either of their own or leased, but hire themselves out, or who cultivate a mere patch of land but have to support themselves chiefly by selling their labor power in agriculture, are called hired agricultural laborers, but still belong to the peasantry." Agrarian Problems in Southernmost China (Shanghai, 1936), p. 8.

Conditions of land tenure provide the clearest mirror of class relations in agriculture. One official estimate made in 1927 held that 55 percent of the Chinese peasantry was entirely landless and 20 percent holders of inadequate land. It was calculated that 81 percent of the cultivable land was concentrated in the hands of 13 percent of the rural population.2 These figures have been in the main substantiated by later investigators. In the north, where individual landholders predominated, study of a sample district showed that although only 5 percent of the farming population consisted of landless tenants, 70 percent of the total held less than 30 percent of the cultivated land in average plots of 10.9 mow, or less than two acres. In another district, it was found that 65.2 percent of the population held 25.9 percent of the land in parcels of less than seven mow, or a fraction above an acre. Landlords and rich peasants, together comprising 11.7 percent of the farming population, held 43 percent of the land, and middle peasants held the rest.

In the far more densely populated Yangtze valley and in the south, where foreign influence had first been felt and where the commercialization of agriculture was more advanced, the disproportions were found to be much greater. In one district of Chekiang province, investigators found that 3 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the land. In Wusih, another district of Central China, 68.9 percent of the farming families owned only 14.2 percent of the land in individual average parcels of 1.4 mow, or less than a quarter of an acre. Landlords and rich peasants, 11.3 percent of the families, owned 65 percent of the land.3 A separate survey made in the southern province of Kwantung revealed that landowners in different sections of the province comprised 12 to 32 percent of the population, and tenants and agricultural laborers 68 to 88 percent. Of the poor peasants representing 64.3 percent of the population in one area, investigators found that 60.4 percent were landless. An average of all the districts studied showed that more than half the farming population owned no land. Of all the land tilled by the poor peasants, only 17.2 percent was owned and 82.8 was leased. The average area owned by a poor peasant family was found to be 0.87 mow and the average area cultivated, including leased land, 5.7 mow. The number of mow necessary to provide the barest subsistence for a peasant family was found, in different districts, to vary between six and ten, and twice that many for tenant farmers.

The invasion of the village by commercial capital and cheap manufactured commodities put an end to the peasant's old self-sufficiency. But because the country remained backward in communications and production techniques, the peasant could not adapt himself to the change. He was simply ruined by it. He had to produce for sale in order to exist, yet the smallness of his land and the primitive character of his farming made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to do this with much success. He not only could not produce enough to provide him with a surplus, but had to go into debt for fertilizer, for food to tide him over until harvest time, for seed, for the rental and use of implements. For these he mortgaged away not only his crop but his land, at rates of interest never lower than 30 percent and more often 60, 70, 80 percent and even higher. The crushing burden of taxes and the rapacious extortions of the militarists who came to rule over him drove the peasant more deeply into debt each successive year and placed him and his land at the mercy of the usurer and the tax collector 5 He was fleeced at will by the merchant because he could not ship his tiny crop to more distant markets and hope for a return. Crops were freely cornered and prices manipulated at the village level by the merchants. Invariably, new debts were all the peasant had to show at the end of a season's toil. They followed him into the next year and into the next generation. Losing his land, he became a tenant. To the landlord he had to surrender 40 to 70 percent of his crop and a substantial additional percentage, often in special dues, gifts, and obligations preserved from the dim feudal past, including the duty of free labor on special occasions fixed by ancient tradition.

Famines, floods, and droughts, against which he was defenceless, often cost him his crop, his land if he had any, and frequently his life. Even in the best years, however, he and his family lived on the edge of starvation. He was little better than a bonded slave to the landlord, the tax collector, the merchant, and the usurer.

This process, in its manifold aspects, plunged the great mass of the peasantry into chronic, unrelieved pauperism. Millions driven off the land begged, starved, took to banditry, or swelled the armies of the war lords. From the south they had streamed abroad, to the Americas, to Malaya, and to the Indies. From the north, they emigrated to the undeveloped lands of Manchuria. Millions of them clogged the cities and towns on the rivers and on the seaboard, an inexhaustible source of cheap manpower that the new infant industries could not absorb. Their labor was still cheaper than that of animals, and throughout the length and breadth of China men did the work of beasts of burden. More and more land was left untilled. China, one of the greatest agricultural countries, was compelled to begin importing foodstuffs in steadily increasing measure.7 The internal and external markets entered upon a disastrous decline. The whole economic structure rotted at its core.

Over the years these conditions erupted in violence that became chronic but remained localized. Such was the banditry that became epidemic in China in the years following the 1911 revolution. It was obvious that the rise of any new revolutionary banner would bring the peasants to their feet and marshal them, almost at a word, in any new effort to revise the conditions of their life. It was also obvious that any new political force which undertook to lead the peasant masses toward a new dispensation would have to undertake in the first place to relieve the peasants of their worst burdens and restore them to their land.

This did not mean that mere redivision and redistribution of the land was the final answer to peasant well-being. Parcelization of the land was already one of the basic ills of Chinese agrarian economy. Any revolutionary transformation of Chinese society would have to include a long-term and far-reaching program for increasing the efficiency of agricultural production in economically larger units making full use of modern farming methods and industrial organization. This is why in the most fundamental sense a peasant economy, with all it contains of the narrow and limited outlook of the small and isolated producer, comes into conflict with the demands of a more rationalized system of urban and rural production. This is why the process of change must necessarily be one of patient education, of experiment and example, and of gradual transformation based upon proved results. It is also the reason why, in the first instance, the conditions for such changes cannot be established until the peasant himself has overthrown the old system that keeps him in thrall. In a backward peasant society, it is impossible to think in terms of rational planning and modernization before the peasant has been helped to free himself from all the older bonds of social subjection and ignorance which hold him down. This is why, above all, these changes have to take place not in rural isolation but as part of a fundamental revision of the economy as a whole.

In China this meant, as we have stated, that the economy of the country as a whole had to be freed to develop in accordance with its own needs. Here it ran into the formidable barrier of foreign capital functioning not as fuel for the general welfare of the people but as a sluice for draining away the country's wealth. In the 1920's, foreign capital owned nearly half of the Chinese cotton industry, the largest industry in the country. It owned a third of the railways outright and held mortgages on the rest. It owned and operated more than half the shipping in Chinese waters and carried in its own bottoms nearly 80 percent of China's foreign and coastal trade. The drain of wealth was a steady one. China's adverse trade balance accumulated between 1912 and 1924 to a total of $1,500,000,000* and to twice that sum in the next ten years. Between 1902 and 1914, foreign investments in China doubled and in the next fifteen years doubled again, reaching an estimated total of $3,300,000,000 (U.S.). More than four-fifths of this sum was directly invested in transport and industrial enterprises and the rest in loans which converted the various Chinese governments into docile tools and preserved the foreign grip on internal and external revenues.8

To regain control of its own productive forces, then, China had to recapture this lost ground; it had to free itself from the political and economic control of the Western powers and Japan. It had to unify itself by cutting across the sectional rivalries perpetuated by rival militarist satrapies in the different foreign spheres of influence. Only in this way could internal peace be restored, the incubus of militarism removed, and the internal market freed to develop by its own momentum. To gain the strength needed to do this, China needed a political leadership that would galvanize the peasantry by opening the way to release from its burdens. The Chinese revolution, in short, had to be an anti-imperialist movement that inscribed the slogans of the agrarian revolt on its banners.

* Calculated in United States dollars at the then par rate, two to one.

How and by whom could this be done? The answer to this key question involves an estimate of the class forces and relationships as they existed at the time—and we speak now of the first years after the first World War—for each section of the population obviously stood in distinct and different relations to the land and to the foreign interests and each would enter the political arena with different objects in view. The peasantry itself, as history has abundantly proved, cannot function independently in the political arena. It is deeply cleft into layers with sharply conflicting economic interests. It is the most numerous, but also the most scattered and most backward section of the population. It is localized and limited, economically and psychologically. For these reasons the village has, in China as elsewhere, always been subject to the town. The peasantry has always been at the command of the urban class able to centralize, weld, control, whether in the economic process or in politics. Without the centripetal force of the city, around which rural economy must inevitably revolve, the peasant is helpless, especially the poorest peasant, the most exploited and the nearest to the soil. His own attempts to better his own lot, without the aid of or in defiance of the dominant city class, have almost invariably taken the form of isolated acts of violence without permanent issue.

This has been especially true in China, a land of impoverished millions, darkened by illiteracy and superstition, so divided sectionally that customs, habits, and the spoken language differ sharply from province to province, town to town, and even from village to village. China's great peasant wars, rising and falling at intervals through the centuries, had always ended in a restratification within the peasantry. The rebelling masses were usually taken in tow by a section of the ruling group which sought not a new society but a new dynasty. When the fighting was done, a new emperor sat on the Dragon Throne and the landlords rose anew. Only an urban ally capable of transforming all social relations could release the peasantry from this vicious historical circle, free it from its own exploiting minority in the countryside, and help it bridge the cultural gap separating town and country.

In Europe the bourgeois revolutions of two and three centuries before had played this historic role. The pattern had many variations, but in essence the rising capitalists of that time had to extend the rights of bourgeois property to the land and free labor from serfdom on the land in order to place it at the disposal of the newly rising industrial system. In France, England, and Holland, the most radical sections of the petty bourgeoisie came forward to help the peasantry break the bonds with which feudalism kept it chained to the soil and thus laid the foundations of the strong national bourgeois states. In twentieth-century China, however, a different social pattern in a different historic context imposed different solutions. The Chinese ruling class could not liberate the peasantry because, as a result of the peculiar conditions and belatedness of its growth, it was too organically tied to the exploitation of the peasantry. It has already been shown how this class rose, not as a distinctly urban grouping with a new economic stake, but out of the old ruling classes. Unlike the European burghers of the past, the urban men of property in China remained bound by a thousand links to the precapitalist or semifeudal system of exploitation on the land. The peasant was subject to the depredations of landlord, usurer, merchant, banker, war lord, tax collector, and local official. The interests of these groups fused and became the interlaced interests of the ruling class as a whole. Not uncommonly, the collector of rent, interest, feudal dues, and taxes, was one and the same person.

"Quite unlike the landlords in France sous l'ancien regime, the landlords in China are often quadrilateral beings," wrote Professor Chen Han-seng in a striking summary passage. "They are rent collectors, merchants, usurers, and administrative officers. Many land1ord-usurers are becoming landlord-merchants; many landlordmerchants are turning themselves into landlord-merchant-politicians. At the same time many merchants and politicians become also landlords. Landlords often possess breweries, oil mills and grain magazines. On the other hand, the owners of warehouses and groceries are mortgagees of land, and eventually its lords. It is a well-known fact that pawnshops and business stores of the landlords are in one way or another affiliated with banks of military and civil authorities.... While some big landlords practice usury as their chief profession, nearly all of them have something to do with it. Again, many landlords are military and civil officers."9

This was the real physiognomy of the Chinese ruling class and of the system through which it bore down upon the peasant. The fundamental relations that governed it were bourgeois in character. Feudalism in its classic form disappeared from China many centuries ago when land, the basic means of production, became alienable. The penetration of commercial capital into the village established there a predominantly capitalist economic structure which continued to bear many precapitalist features. Thus the landlord-merchant-banker-politician-tax collector derived his wealth from usury, market speculation, land mortgages, state taxes, industrial profits, and ground rent. At the same time, from the older sources of revenue imbedded in the social structure, he extracted tolls strongly feudal in character and origin: dues to the landlord in free labor and gifts, rent in kind, forced labor, military service, and "likin" or local customs taxes.

Under the molding pressure of imperialism, as we have seen, the most important section of the Chinese ruling class had also become brokers, once, twice, or thrice removed, for the operations of foreign or foreign-controlled capital, just as the war lords and their governments had been converted into pawns on the chessboard of inter-imperialist rivalries. Now aspiring Chinese industrialists looked forward, certainly, to developing their own wealth. They began to seek a loosening of the foreign grip on the country. But the fact was that they still leaned heavily on their foreign rivals and derived much of their revenue from them. The gulf which separated them from the great mass of the people was far wider and less bridgeable than the antagonism between them and the foreigners. From the foreigners they could and would try to exact concessions, to demand and secure a larger share of the spoils. But they could not hope to satisfy the masses of the people without undermining themselves. Land could not be restored to the peasants without upsetting all existing property relations and destroying the economic foundations of the ruling class itself in town and country alike. This fundamental and inescapable fact predetermined the limits to which the propertied classes of China would go in the national-revolutionary movement that rose in the years following 1919.

But these were by no means the limits of the perspectives of the revolution in China. The same economic growth and circumstances which had stirred nationalist feeling among nascent Chinese industrialists after the first World War had also brought into being an urban working class which now also entered the political arena as a major participant. This section of the population was estimated in 1927 to consist of about 1,500,000 factory workers, about 1,750,000 other industrial workers (miners, seamen, railroad workers) still closely linked, socially and economically, to the mass of urban shopworkers and handicraftsmen, numbering more than 11,000,000.1° This new urban class was still raw and young. The first modern labor unions, as distinct from the older craft guilds, appeared in China only in 1918. Yet, barely a year later, workers were already intervening in the political life of the country, striking in support of nationalist students. Six years later, 1,000,000 Chinese workers participated in strikes, many of them directly political in character. Two years after that, Chinese unions counted 3,000,000 members and in Shanghai the workers carried out a victorious insurrection which placed political power within their grasp.

The existence of this class in Chinese society introduced a wholly new element and opened entirely new perspectives for the nationalist revolution. Unlike the city banker, industrialist, official, or moneylender, the Chinese worker had no stake in preserving the existing system of rural exploitation. On the contrary, he was a victim of that same system. In some ways, his close ties to the village represented a liability rather than an asset in a political sense. The typical Chinese worker was fresh from the ranks of the peasantry. His family was still possibly on the land somewhere, trying desperately to survive. He himself had come to the city because rural hardship had driven him there. The Chinese industrial worker had been physically severed from the land but he was psychologically still bound to it. His own dearest hope, usually, was to return to it. It was not impossible that the landlord who owned his family's land was his urban employer's father or uncle or cousin. But the Chinese worker, on the other hand, found himself able to come to grips with his problems in an entirely new way and with far greater power. Feeble as Chinese industry was, the specific gravity of the worker in it was still greater than that of the propertied class. The worker proved this by plunging swiftly and even decisively into political life. He became the newest and most significant among the political forces taking shape and getting into motion in the China of the early 1920's. He was not mature, either in the political or economic sense, but the situation into which he was thrust was maturely ripe for his intervention. The whole course of the oncoming revolution would be determined by the ability of the urban working class to assert its leadership over the mass of peasants in the countryside.