The history of the development of tenancy

The tenancy system emerged in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. In the late Spring and Autumn period, the Zhou Emperor lost his supreme power over the land, "the public land was not ruled", the land relationship was gradually privatized, the well-field system was destroyed, and the feudal dependence began to arise and develop. The newly emerged landlord class changed the old way of exploitation and recruited fugitive slaves and bankrupt commoners as their own "private tenants" and assigned the land to them for cultivation and collected rent from them, thus giving rise to the tenantry system. This is what Dong Zhongshu said that after the change of the law by Shang Yang, land could be bought and sold, and the bankrupt people had no way to make a living, "or they could plow the land of the rich and powerful people, and they would be taxed at the rate of a tithe". Therefore, the rent of land in ancient China was dominated by rent in kind from the day when the tenancy relationship came into being. The basic form of rent in kind was the share-rent system, and the ratio of the share of the tenant to the landlord was usually "the tithe of the tax".

During the Qin and Han Dynasties, the tenancy system was initially developed. As a result of land annexation, more and more small farmers lost their land and became sharecroppers of large landowners. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of displaced persons, the autocratic state also rented out a large amount of feudal state-owned land to the peasants, i.e., the "fake public land". During the reigns of Emperor Xuan and Yuan of the Western Han Dynasty (86-50 BC), eight times an imperial decree was issued to "fake public land for the people". Those who rented government land paid rent to the state, which was generally between 40% and 50% of the harvest, and was called "fake tax". According to the records of Juyen Hanzhuan, there were individual cases of fixed-rate rent in the rent of government fields in the Western Han Dynasty. In addition, a certain amount of government land was rented by the powerful and the rich, who either drove the slaves to cultivate it or leased it to the small farmers, so that "the public had the name of obstruction and falsehood, and the profit was returned to the public". This shows that the phenomenon of "two landlords" had already appeared in the tenancy relationship of government land.

From the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty until the period of the Wei, Jin and North-South Dynasties, with the expansion of the power of the powerful landlords and the formation of the scholar-landlord groups, the tenancy relationship between the landlords and the peasants also entered a stage of particularly serious personal dependence.

The peasants who were dependent on the big families in this period came from a slightly different source, mainly from the free and bankrupt small farmers who were transformed into apprentices, and also from the guests, the clansmen, and the exempted slaves. These dependent peasants rented the farmland, cultivated it, and paid the rent to their masters, "losing half of their taxes". In addition to the rent in kind, they were required to perform unpaid labor for the lord of the manor, such as breaking and cutting down forests, repairing reservoirs and canals, building courtyards, and serving as transporters. The landowners also organized them into private armies to guard their masters' houses and yards during normal times, and to follow them to the battlefield during wartime, thus gradually forming the system of ministries and family soldiers. They were generally out of the control of the authoritarian state and were the private members of the big families. From the Cao Wei's measure of "giving the clients below the ministers a different number of rented oxen" to the Western Jin's regulation of officials occupying fields according to their rank, and the system of giving customers and relatives, as well as the Eastern Jin's system of giving customers, it shows that the authoritarian state gradually recognized the phenomenon of the occupation of the population by the big families by the law. Therefore, the dependent peasants at that time did not have their own household registration, but were attached to the registration of the main family. It was only through self-redemption or the release of the lord of the farm that they were able to break away from the relationship of dependence and gain their freedom.

In the early years of the Cao Wei Dynasty, the system of cantonization was widely practiced, and the tenancy system of the civil land was applied to the government land. Therefore, the status of the cantoners in the civil cantonization and the cabs in the military cantonization were clearly characterized by the characteristics of the times, and they were subject to the strict control of the state.

However, during the period of Wei, Jin, and North-South Dynasties, while the tenancy relationship of strong dependence prevailed in the large farms, the tenancy of the general civil fields had already seen the phenomenon of individual contractual relationship, and a new form of tenancy was quietly taking shape. From the Sui Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty (from the late 6th century to the 14th century A.D.), the system of leasehold tenancy prevailed.

In the early Tang Dynasty, the leasehold tenancy system was already quite popular. In the middle of the Tang Dynasty, the annexation of land became more and more intense, the system of large land ownership developed rapidly, the system of equalization of land was finally destroyed, and most of the small farmers lost their land and became sharecroppers of the feudal landlords. The proportion of tenancy system in the social and economic life of the society then expanded rapidly and became dominant.

In the early Tang Dynasty, except for the feudal nobles and their subordinates and slaves, the rest of the people were all householders. The Tang laws explicitly prohibited the people from wandering to other places. The central government sent several envoys to search for and collect the displaced families (see "Households"). After the middle period, the government introduced the policy of registering the fugitive households, and those who were registered were called clients. Although most of the clients were tenants, it was only a short form of "guest household", which was symmetrical to "land household". The meaning of "customer" changed significantly in the Song Dynasty, when it became a synonym for "unproductive tenant households", as opposed to the main households (tax households). According to the analysis of the household registers of the Song Dynasty, the clients accounted for about one-third of the total number of households at that time; at the same time, it was common for the fifth class of subordinate households among the main households to rent land from the landlords. Therefore, after the Song Dynasty, tenant farmers became the mainstay of social production. Due to the popularity of the tenancy system, the derogatory names of large landowners, such as "hoi mins" and "annexationists" since the Qin and Han dynasties, were gradually abandoned. In the Tang and Song dynasties, they were openly called "landowners".

The universal implementation of the leasehold tenancy system was the main feature of the development of tenancy relations in this period. According to the excavated documents of the Tang Dynasty, the contractual relationship was very popular among the tenants of land in Xizhou, so much so that the leasing of important means of production, such as plowing oxen, was also subject to the conclusion of a contract. After the Song Dynasty, the contract became the basic form of tenancy. In the case of government land, the contract was also made in general.

The tenancy agreement of this period, although it was still a proof of exploitation of peasants by feudal landlords, it was the first time in history that the rights and obligations of both parties were clearly defined. At that time, tenancy contracts were generally divided into field drains, stating the landlord, the tenant and the informer, and stipulating the amount of rent, the form of payment, and the duration of the tenancy. For the tenant farmers, the contract basically guaranteed their right to cultivate the land for a certain period of time, and the freedom to withdraw from the land after the contract expired. In the fifth year of the Tian Sheng era of the Northern Song Dynasty (1027), the Song court explicitly stipulated that in the future, "private tenants" could, on the day of harvesting the land each year, discuss the settlement of their land without obtaining a certificate from the landlord, and each of them could take advantage of their own convenience. The universalization of the leasehold tenancy system was a great historical progress.

The development of tenancy system after Sui and Tang Dynasty was also manifested in other aspects.

First of all, there were localized changes in the form of rent. During the Tang and Song dynasties, except for some economically backward areas where the labor rent was still high, the product rent was widely practiced in the general areas, and the proportion of the fixed rent in kind was enlarged.

Under the share-rent in kind, the landlords tended to supervise and intervene in the production because the harvest was directly related to the amount of rent, and their super-economic coercion on the tenant farmers was also more serious. The fixed rent was developed from the share rent. Under the fixed rent, no matter how much the harvest was, the peasants had to pay the full rent according to the contract, so the landlords no longer interfered directly with the production of the tenant farmers, which was conducive to the tenant farmers' independent management. At the same time, since the increase in production under the fixed rent was at the disposal of the tenant farmers, their incentive to produce would also be increased. According to the analysis of the documents, in the early Tang Dynasty, the fixed rent was already popular in the land tenancy of Xizhou, and in the Song Dynasty, the fixed rent system was also practiced more often in the tenancy of private lands in the economically developed areas of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Jiangnan. Most of the government land was subject to fixed rent.

The amount of product rent was still widely practiced in the form of a share of profit, and if the tenant rented the main family's oxen, he was required to pay an additional rent of one or two percent. The fixed rent varied greatly depending on the fertility of the field, but it was generally half of the yield. In addition to the regular rent, the landlords would invariably levy various kinds of extra rents under various names, such as rice consumption, dendrobium noodles, sharecropping chickens, and wheat rent, etc. In ancient China, there were various names for extra rents. In ancient China, most of the names of extra rent had already appeared in the Song Dynasty. In addition, the landlords also used the technique of "sharecropping" to constantly increase the amount of land rent collected.

While product rents were widely practiced, monetary relations also influenced the form of land rents to varying degrees. In Xizhou during the Tang Dynasty, the prepaid rent for renting "standing fields" was mostly in money. In the Song dynasty, the governmental land rents were heavily monetary, but this was mainly due to financial needs. What is more significant is that the rents of the sangma land were generally paid in money, and some remote tenants living in overseas cities and towns received discounted money rents, which reflected the development of the commodity money economy.

Secondly, in the tenancy management of government fields in the Song Dynasty, a large number of tenants by the situation of the tenant, the situation of the tenant of the government fields, no longer like the two Han Dynasty, the magnates will be part of the direct management of the slaves to drive the plow, but all of them are transferred to the small farmers, acting as a second landowner, thus forming the owner, the owner of the field and the seed households of the three-tiered relationship, so that tenant relationships more complex. In addition, some of the tenants of the government land had already obtained the right of perpetual tenancy, and they often inherited the government land from their children and grandchildren, and regarded the government land as "as if it were a perpetual estate". Therefore, the law of the Song Dynasty provided that the tenants of government land could transfer their tenancy rights to other tenants. In the transfer, the new tenant had to pay a certain price to the old tenant, which was called "pay for tenancy" or "pay for tenancy". However, the phenomenon of separating the right to own land from the right to use it (tenancy rights) was not yet found in the civil fields, which means that the right to perpetual tenancy was still in its infancy.

Finally, the legal status of the tenant was gradually clarified.

Since the Qin and Han dynasties, sharecroppers had been the private property of the big families. Until the Tang Dynasty, the peasants who were sharecroppers of large landowners' farms were still "not provided for by the king's service, and their books were not kept". After the founding of the Zhao-Song dynasty, the clients were registered in the household registers and thus became the householders of the feudal state, and their right to household registration was recognized, and they had an equal relationship with the other householders.

Despite this, the relationship between the tenant and the master was unequal in terms of their legal status as master and servant. The different punishments for the same offense were the main manifestation of the unequal legal status of the tenant and the owner. It was only in the early Song Dynasty that the feudal law had not yet made a clear provision for the inequality between the tenant and the owner of the land in terms of serving the punishment. It was only in the seventh year of the Jiayou reign of Emperor Renzong (1062) that the Song court stipulated that if a landowner assaulted or killed a tenant farmer, the local officials could report to the court and "grant amnesty to the original situation". In the seventh year of Emperor Shenzong's Yuanfeng reign (1084), it was further stipulated that if a landlord killed a tenant, he could be punished by one degree of remission, i.e., the tenant's legal status was lowered by one degree compared to that of a commoner. Thereafter, until the Yuan Dynasty, the inequality in the legal status of the tenant and the owner was widening, and the tenant was even lower than the commoners by three to four degrees. In addition, during this period, other legal provisions concerning tenant farmers were also clarified.

The fact that the feudal legal relationship between tenants and masters was regulated according to different relationships under the patriarchal system of law (see Patriarchal Law) shows that the relationship between tenants and masters in China took the form of a patriarchal system.

The fact that the legal status of tenant farmers was low during the Song and Yuan dynasties indicates that there was a more serious personal dependence and that the development of tenant-tenant relations had not yet reached a fully mature stage. From the Ming Dynasty to the Republic of China (from the end of the 14th century to 1949), the tenantry system, which was a purely rent-paying relationship, developed gradually.

After the Ming and Qing dynasties, the main sign of the development of feudal tenancy was the decline of the strict personal dependence between masters and tenants, and the legal provisions that had depreciated the status of the tenant farmers since the Song and Yuan dynasties were abandoned. The rebellious struggles of the tenant farmers in the Ming and Qing dynasties were both a cause and a reflection of the weakening of the personal dependence relationship. In the fifth year of the Hongwu era (1372), Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, issued an edict stipulating that "tenants, regardless of the order of their teeth, should be treated with the courtesy of the youngest and the eldest when they meet the owner of the land; if they are relatives, they should not be bound by the status of master and tenant but should only be treated with the courtesy of their relatives." Though there was still a difference in the length of the tenants, the feudal etiquette was different from the law and belonged more to the realm of social morality. For the first time in the history of China, tenant farmers enjoyed the legal status of commoners in their relationship with their landlords. In the fifth year of the Yongzheng reign (1727) of the Qing Dynasty, a new system was enacted which further prohibited "unlawful dickeys and gentlemen to put up sticks and beat their tenants without authorization". Of course, the tenants of the Ming and Qing dynasties were still far from being completely equal to the landlords, and the landlords could still make use of the political power, the clan power, and the theocracy to oppress them, but the changes in the feudal code after all reflected the profound changes in the tenancy relations.

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there still existed in some areas a tenantry system of strong dependence, i.e., the tenant-servant system, which was maintained by custom and by the written agreement, and which was a remnant of some backward relations of production since the Song and Yuan Dynasties, but its continuation was related to the development of the dickey landlords' groups during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The tenant-servant system was popular in some areas of Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Henan, Guangdong, and Fujian Provinces, and it was especially prevalent in the Huizhou area of southern Anhui. The title of the tenant servant also varies from region to region, such as the world servant, Zhuang Nu, Zhuang servant, fire sharecropper, fine people, companion Yu, companion, etc. The main feature of the tenant-servant system is that the tenant servant system is characterized by the following. The main characteristic of the tenant-servant system was that the tenant-servants were poorer than the general tenant-farmers and were in a similar position as the slave girls or hired laborers. Their main means of production, except for land, were provided by the landlords, with whom they were strictly bound by the title of master and servant for life and in succession to their descendants. Even if they left the land, their title would remain forever.

However, the tenant-servant system in the Ming and Qing dynasties was in the process of declining, especially after the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the tenant-servant's subordination to the master tended to be loosened. For example, the scope of service tended to be relatively fixed from the endless "extra levies", and a certain amount of wine and tips had to be paid. The number of tenant servants was decreasing. Some of the tenantry servants were released from their master-servant relationship with the landlords by means of ransom. Meanwhile, the feudal laws also changed. In the fifth year of the Yongzheng reign, an imperial edict was issued to exempt those who had no documents and deeds and who were not kept by their masters from being good servants in the south of Anhui Province, thus beginning the process of narrowing down the scope of the servants in the law. In the fourteenth year of Jiaqing (1809), tens of thousands of servants were exempted from the law in southern Anhui. In the fifth year of the Daoguang period (1825), a similar oracle was issued. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the tenant servants generally existed only in some strong clans and the clans of the red gentry landlords; during the Republic of China, they were mostly owned by the ancestral halls of the clans with strong feudal and patriarchal power, and the private possessors were already rare.

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the form of land rent also underwent great changes. The physical division of rent was still prevalent throughout the country, but a complete transformation from division to fixed rent had begun. Under the fixed rent system, the relationship between the tenant and the owner was generally a simple one of rent payment. This was the mainstream of the tenant system at that time. Labor rent remained only in a few areas. In some places, the landlords had to pay a certain amount of "labor money" to get the tenant farmers to deliver the rent to their doorsteps. The landlords no longer directed the production or cared about the quality of the production, so that there was a phenomenon of "those who only knew the income of the rent but did not know where the fields were". Under the stimulation of the commodity and money economy, the money rent, which was converted from the fixed rent and paid in kind, also developed to a certain extent. However, the monetary rent was still a feudal rent and did not account for a large proportion of the various forms of land rent. By the 1930s, in the economically developed Jiangsu Province, money rent accounted for about 16 percent of the land rent; in Zhejiang and Anhui, it was 10 percent.

The development of the commodity economy, the weakening of personal dependence and the popularity of fixed rent brought about the development of the leasehold system and perpetual tenancy.

The rent deposit system was a system whereby tenants paid a certain amount of money to the landlord at the beginning of their tenancy. During the Wanli period (1573-1620) of the Ming Dynasty, there were already records of rent-pledging in some areas of Fujian, and in the early Qing Dynasty, rent-pledging became more popular, and by the Gan and Jia period (1736-1820), it had already spread to all the eighteen provinces. Rent pledge generally has two meanings: first, it represents a certain land right, so it is also called "top head", "base foot", etc.; second, it is used as a deposit for land rent, so some regions call it "letter money", "letter money" or "letter money". Secondly, it was used as a deposit for land rent, so it was called "letter money", "deposit", "advance money" in some areas. "In this regard, the nature of the rent deposit system was similar to that of the pre-rent system which was popular at that time. The main reason for the development of the rent-pledging system was the intensification of the tenant farmers' struggle against rent and the loosening of the relationship of personal dependence between the tenants and the leaseholders, which made the realization of the rent by purely super-economic coercion seriously difficult, and thus required the guarantee of an economic relationship. The amount of rent deposit generally depended on the amount of land rent, but it was not the same in all regions, and in some places the amount of rent deposit was much higher than the land rent. Rents were usually paid in money. Since the tenant farmers lost a certain amount of interest by paying the rent, and the landlords often forced the tenant farmers to increase the rent, or refused to return the rent when the tenant farmers withdrew from the tenancy, the so-called "rotten rent", the rent deposit system aggravated the economic exploitation of the tenant farmers. During the Republic of China, the rent deposit system was still prevalent in all parts of the country.

The so-called perpetual tenancy meant that for the same piece of land, while the landlord had the right to the bottom of the field, the tenant farmer had the right to the top of the field. The landlord could not change the tenant farmers when buying and selling the land, and the tenant farmers should not be interfered by the landlord in the use of the land or in the transfer of the land. The right of perpetual tenancy appeared in the Song Dynasty, and there were individual records in the Yuan Dynasty, but its general development and the formation of a more widely popular system was still after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, and the system was prevalent in the Qing Dynasty in the more economically developed provinces in the south, such as Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Anhui, etc. During the Republic of China period, the right of perpetual tenancy was practiced by the landowners. During the Republic of China period, the perpetual tenancy was more developed; in 1936, perpetual tenant farmers accounted for 40% of the total number of tenant farmers in Jiangsu Province, 30% in Zhejiang Province, and 44% in Anhui Province. The term "perpetual tenancy" varied from place to place, for example, it was called "field surface", "field skin", "field foot", "water seedling", "water rent", etc. The formation of perpetual tenancy was done through a process of "tenanting". The formation of perpetual tenancy rights came about through the sale and purchase of field skins, field surfaces, sharecropping, pledging, paying deposits to the landlords, and retaining field surfaces by pledging or selling the bottom of the fields. A few rich peasants, in order to expand their business, often acquired permanent tenancy rights to a large amount of land by buying it at a price, and hired laborers to run the business and extract surplus labor. Some others, including the gentry and the tycoons, bought the perpetual tenancy rights in order to lease out the land for re-exploitation of the land rent, which was typical of the second landlords. However, most of the poor tenant farmers bought the perpetual tenancy rights in order to maintain the simple reproduction and to develop the individual economy. Although the development of perpetual tenancy did not alleviate the economic exploitation of the tenant farmers, it enabled them to get rid of the landlord's intervention in the production process and to secure a more stable right of cultivation. Under the situation of concentration of land rights and fierce competition for tenancy rights, they had the means to oppose the landlord's increase of rents and sharecropping and thus gained more personal freedom.

Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, with the expansion of tenant farmers and the development of free tenancy, the feudal government gradually intervened and interfered in the tenancy relationship, exercising centralized control over the tenant farmers on behalf of the landlord class. On the one hand, as early as in the Yuan Dynasty, the feudal government had ordered private landlords to remit land rents. In the early Qing Dynasty, similar edicts were issued more often to prevent the private landlords from exploiting the land and intensifying class conflicts by implementing the policy of rest with the people. On the other hand, the policy of safeguarding the economic interests of private landlords was exercised. In the decree of the late Southern Song Dynasty, there was already a provision that "after the first day of October, and before the 30th day of the first month, all the counties would accept the complaints of the landlords and demand the rent arrears of the tenants". In the fifth year of the Yongzheng reign, the Qing court prohibited landlords from beating tenant farmers and at the same time provided for the criminal punishment of tenant farmers for non-payment of rent in the form of law. Since then, local governments issued notices prohibiting tenant farmers from defaulting on rent payments, and the phenomenon of using the power of the government to assist private landlords in rent collection became more and more common. After the defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a kind of organization called "Rent Stacks" appeared in the Suzhou and Zhejiang areas. Some of them were jointly run by the government and the private sector, some were run by the rich merchant landowners, with the government as the backer behind the scene, and they united the landowners in a certain area to set up a field guild and a general rent stack to collect rent from the peasants in a unified manner. Every year, a portion of the rented grain was paid to the local authorities as a reward for their assistance in rent collection. During the Republic of China period, the organization of the rent collection office was still the main tool to impose super-economic coercion on the peasants in the Suzhou and Zhejiang areas. This was a concrete form of power intervention in the tenancy relationship.

On the whole, before 1949, the tenancy system in China had not fully entered the stage of simple rent-paying relationship, and the capitalist tenancy relationship had not yet taken place. After the land reform movement, the feudal tenancy system in mainland China was abolished.