二〇世紀中國の一棉作農村における農民層分解について

Abstract

The author of this article would like to convey the following points to prospective readers. The object of his investigation is the village of Mi-chang 米廠村 in Feng-run county 豐潤縣, Hebei 河北, which was one of three villages studied in the late 1930's by the South Manchurian Railway's Second Eastern Hebei Village Investigation Team 滿鐵第二次冀東農村實態調査班. Mi-chang-cun (population about 120 households), located south of the Xu-ge-zhuang 胥各莊 station of the Jing-shan Railway 京山鐵路, was both a typical North China village and a representative producer of "Northeastern River Cotton" 東北河棉, which occupied a unique position in the Tianjin cotton market. 0n the basis of an exhaustive treatment of the detailed statistical materials contained in the SMR report, the author arrives at two principal conclusions. 1) The expansion of the cultivation of cotton for industrial uses generated competition between peasants who were operating on quite different scales. A shift from a natural to a commodity economy provided occasions for both prosperity and collapse on the part of the peasants who were small-scale commodity-producers. This is the phenomenon which we usually call "the differentiation of the peasantry", and which indeed is the primary force within the villages that drives out the feudal order in favor of capitalist society --a force which existing studies have unfairly underestimated. 2) The problem of feudal land tenure before the revolution of 1949 has up to now been treated as if it were a separate topic to be dealt with in isolation from other phenomena, but the author does not think in this fashion. Land tenure must be considered in connection with agricultural production (management) if it is to be correctly understood. The development of commercialized farming and the differentiation of the peasantry into rich peasants and poor peasants created the opportunity for feudal conditions of land tenure to give way to modern conditions. In the l930's this possibility was hedged by a number of difficulties, a fact which constitutes the profound social background to the Guomindang 國民黨 road to modernization without passing through a violent revolution.