Government in modern China has fallen heir to a depression centuries old, arising from inequitable land distribution, overtaxation, insufficient public works for drainage and communications, and—in more recent generations—the evils attendant upon sharp economic change. Most economic writers agree that some of the difficulties of Chinese agriculture are caused by the smallness of individual holdings and by population pressure. Such factors are not subject to immediate remedy; the peasants have attributed their misfortune primarily to landlordism and political oppression. The Chinese Communists, on their economic front, may perform a valuable service if they are able to devise new methods of social organization which will provide relief for the organic difficulties of Chinese agriculture. Of all the important problems of China, the land problem shows government ineffectiveness at its worst.
Behind the T'ai-p'ing rebellion which flared up in unparalleled fanaticism in the 1850's and 1860's, there was the long provocation of a land system which made farming unprofitable and a government supine in the face of unreversed decline. The Boxer rebellion burst forth from the unrest of the peasants, although it could be deflected by the demagoguery of the Manchu officials and changed into wild xenophobia. When the fiercely discordant economics of imperialism and international industrialism intruded upon the old and already corrupted economy, farm existence became even less tolerable than it might have been if left to its native miseries. Dynastic decomposition was hastened by the collapse of handicraft economy and the fiscal disorganization caused by Western commercial activity.
In the earliest days of the Republican-Nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen, emphasis was on land reform. Sun Yat-sen's family had suffered from overtaxation when he was a boy.[20] Nationalization and equalization of the land were slogans used at the founding of the Tung Mêng Hui; the program seems at that time to have been derived from old Chinese distributism and from Henry George.[21] With the coming of the Republic, two years went by, however, before any agrarian legislation was passed, and the new laws had no perceptible consequence.[22] The problem of land reform had to be fought out on the ideological front and placed above the military before it could become a fit subject for competent government action.
The epoch of the tuchüns added to agricultural misfortune. Militarism had a direct effect on the deterioration of the land economy, and an indirect one in that it led to the cultivation of opium as the one money-making crop which could meet the excessive tax demands of the militarists. A Chinese writer has described the years which marked the ending of the tuchün system as follows:
The ... misery among the farming population in the decennial period 1920-1930 [must be] attributed to (1) internal warfare; (2) neglect of agriculture; (3) low stage of art; and (4) over-population. The civil wars during the last eighteen years have increased the cost of production, have added to the farmers' ... burden of taxation, have raised the rate of interest on loan, and have caused endless suffering to [those] who form the basis of our social and economic life. Great many people have often wondered as to why a country like China with 75 per cent of her total population engaged in farming and with such a vast territory should suffer from the high cost of living; but to the student of social problems the question is comparatively simple, for the recurrence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic has [changed] conditions of supply and has driven millions of farmers out of cultivated areas, and this alone suffices to explain an unprecedented rise of prices of food and other necessities of life during the last few years, especially since 1926.[23]
These conditions led to farmers' movements, which became effective, however, only as they merged with the broader ideological tendencies in China.
The Farmers' Movement ... may ... be divided into four periods: (1) the period of reaction to bad conditions ... (1921-1925); (2) the period of communistic activities and violence (1925-1927); (3) the period of retrenchment and preparation for reconstruction (from the spring of 1927-1928); and (4) the period of reconstruction (since 1928).[24]
The Kuomintang-Communist alliance struck severely at the tuchün armies by giving their own forces a sense of doctrine and by tying together the causes of patriotism and agricultural reform. The joint agrarian program was a failure in that it accentuated precisely those issues on which neither of the parties could compromise. When the Communists and the Nationalists parted, the Nationalists took one portion of Sun Yat-sen's economic program (industrialization and communications) for emphasis, and the Communists another (land reform). The agrarian issue was a source of strength to the Chinese Red Army, intent upon winning the peasantry. It was a military weakness to the new-style Nationalist armies officered largely by the relatives of landlords; they had little sympathy for the economic troubles of the farmers whose lands they occupied. The Nationalist Reconstruction aimed in great part at removing both the acute and the latent causes of peasant rebellion, thereby cutting the ground from under the feet of the Communists. Although it met with more success than any other project of its type in modern China, Western observers agree in regarding it as inadequate.[25]