Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance: the lower Yangzi by Kathryn Bernhardt

By Kathryn Bernhardt

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To understand rent and tax, each must be viewed in its relationship to the other and not in isolation. Page 5 At the same time, the three parties involved in tax and rent are treated as separate and autonomous, each with its own distinctive set of interests. Orthodox Chinese Marxists tend to collapse these parties into two, the landlords and the state on the one hand and tenants on the other. Similarly, the moral economists tend to conflate large elite landholders and small peasant proprietors into the single category of taxpayer and then pit that group against the state.

The peasants, far from being receptive to Communist appeals, proved quite resistant to radical action against a state power to which they had repeatedly and successfully turned for help against landlord exactions. Tax relations, no less than rent relations, were significantly restructured in the period under study. The first move in this direction was the celebrated tax reduction of 1863, a major concession to Jiangnan landowners that greatly eased their burden until the turn of the century. Then, currency fluctuations and escalating exactions by the modernizing Chinese state negated much of the salutary effect of the reforms.

In this interpretation, then, the Communist revolution was the inevitable culmination of the intensification of rural class conflict. 1 Like the orthodox Chinese Marxist approach, the moral economy perspective highlights the increasing precariousness of peasant life under the impact of an expanding market economy. But it adds to that dynamic an emphasis on the role of the state, especially a state modernizing under the aegis of imperialism. In this view the incorporation of an agrarian society into the capitalist world economy and the extension of the state's reach seriously threatened the peasants' ability to maintain themselves at a subsistence level.

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