淸末・民國時期の蘇州における納租情況 : 租棧簿册の統計的分析

Abstract

Using farm rent registers in Zuzhan 租棧 as historical resources, this essay tries to infer the amount of farm rent payments and the circumstances of those payments in modern Suzhou 蘇州 in the following way. Although farm rent payments did not change as they appear in the farm rent registers after the unified tax reduction in Tongzhi (同治) 5, there were many cases of individual reductions, which suggest that there was a trend toward lowering farm rent payments in reality, apart from the farm rent registers. While one shi 石 per one mu 畝 of land was the average, reductions were made depending on the ime of payment, agricultural disasters, and so forth. Thus it became standard that in a good year, tenants would pay about 90 percent, but in a poor year, they would only be expected to pay 80 percent. Though generally tenants paying rent late were expected to pay the full amount, towards the end of the Qing there were many cases of reductions for late payers as well, and records reveal a shift towards "nominal payments" for delinquent tenants. Due to rent resistance on the part of small tenant farmers in modern Suzhou, the rent collection by Suzhou landlords became extremely difficult. At the end of the Qing, tenants paid 80 percent in good years, 70 percent in average years, but only 60 percent in bad ones. Around the time of the Taiping Rebellion 太平天國 and the Republican Revolution 辛亥革命, the rate of farm rent collection was extremely low, while the rate of delinquent rent payments was low at the beginning of Nationalist period, the rate of rent payments did not improve in terms of the percentage of the whole actually paid. In the latter half of the 1920's and afterwards, landlords faced a crisis in rent management as delinquent rents rapidly rose under the influence of agricultural panics and other disastrous events.