Chinese Agriculture in the 1930s: Investigations into John Lossing Buck’s Rediscovered ‘Land Utilization in China’ Microdata

324 Pages·2019·4.826 MB·English

by  Hao Hu, Funing Zhong, Calum G. Turvey

chinese
agriculture
in the 1930s
Investigations into John Lossing Buck’s
Rediscovered ‘Land Utilization
in China’ Microdata
Edited by Hao Hu, Funing Zhong,
and Calum G. Turvey
Chinese Agriculture in the 1930s
Hao Hu • Funing Zhong
Calum G. Turvey
Editors
Chinese Agriculture
in the 1930s
Investigations into John Lossing
Buck’s Rediscovered ‘Land Utilization
in China’ Microdata
Editors
Hao Hu Funing Zhong
College of Economics and College of Economics and
Management Management
Nanjing Agricultural University Nanjing Agricultural University
Nanjing, China Nanjing, China
Calum G. Turvey
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-12687-2 ISBN 978-3-030-12688-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12688-9
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To our wives
P
reface
This book is comprised of a number of papers drawn from the works of
John Lossing Buck’s 1937 publication of Land Use in China. Buck’s study
was based on a survey of 16,786 farms, 168 localities, and 38,256 farm
families in 22 provinces in China between 1929 and 1933. It was a land-
mark study in the sense that no previous widescale study had attempted to
provide a geographic and economic map of Chinese agriculture.
Although frequent references have been made to Buck’s study, these
focused on the three statistical volumes prepared by Buck and his col-
leagues. That work was prepared by abacus, and the final written volume
was driven largely by the statistical information and cross-tabulations that
could be taken at the time.
Where does this book fit in? Around the year 2000 a number of paper-
wrapped packages were uncovered at the Nanjing Agricultural University
(NJAU). The packages contained the actual paper spreadsheets with the
individual farm records of some 10,000+ farm households collected by
Buck and his team. Immediate efforts were taken by a team of Chinese
and Japanese scholars to preserve the records, first by photographic repro-
duction and then a years-long effort to digitize the data into a useable
electronic format. From around 2007, enough data had been recorded to
deploy modern economic thought and econometric analysis to start bring-
ing the data to life. It would take nearly another decade to complete the
digitization effort, check and verify the data, and prepare it in a form that
could be used to empirically, and statistically, evaluate the economics of
vii
viii PREFACE
Chinese agriculture in the 1930s. This book contains 14 chapters, includ-
ing the introduction and conclusion. Three chapters are historical in
nature. Chapter 2 provides a biopic of Buck, how he arrived in China with
a degree in agriculture from Cornell University as an agricultural mission-
ary, landed a faculty position at the University of Nanjing to start a pro-
gram of study in agricultural economics, started to implement small- and
large-scale surveys, including those that led to his two books, Chinese
Farm Economy in 1930 and Land Utilization in China in 1937, and his
broader efforts to improve and understand Chinese agriculture. The
socioeconomic and political conditions facing Chinese farmers in the
Republican era were largely normalized in Buck’s studies—taken as given
and understood. But in the modern era it is difficult to truly understand
and interpret Buck’s work without some semblance of understanding of
the calamities, catastrophes, and conflicts in the Republican era generally,
and the period of study, 1929–1933 in particular. Chapter 3 provides an
overview of these conditions. As illustrated by the many footnotes to
English language periodicals, this chapter was prepared and compiled
from contemporaneous news reports. We had some hesitation about
including this chapter in the book, but ultimately decided to err on the
side of caution so that the works that follow can be placed in a proper
context by the reader.
Chapter 4 may be viewed as a case study of economic archaeology. In
this chapter the authors summarize the many years of effort put into com-
piling and checking the discovered microdata. It details, as accurately as
possible, what is believed to have happened to the data records over the
years, the circumstances under which they were discovered, the efforts at
data recovery, and finally the painstaking efforts at ensuring that once digi-
tized, the data matched the actual summaries provided in Buck’s statistical
volumes. Incredibly, the efforts confirmed the accuracy of Buck’s tables,
even to the point of standardizing weights and measures. Importantly, the
chapter identifies the specific variables actually recovered. Unfortunately,
for reasons unknown, many of the original worksheets were not recov-
ered, so that the chapters that follow faced several data constraints that
may affect statistical and econometric reliability.
The remaining chapters represent the analyses done to date. Chapter 5
addresses some of the reliability issues. Noting that some academics
questioned Buck’s survey techniques, Funing Zhong, Hao Hu, and Qun
Su undertook a comparison of Buck’s data with other data sources and
PREFACE ix
conclude that the criticisms are not justified, and that Buck’s data falls
within the ranges of previously documented metrics.
Perhaps one of the more important contributions of this study is the
ability to compare a historical representation of Chinese agriculture in the
1930s to the present era. Much, of course, has changed since the
Republican era, including the transformative post-revolutionary period
between 1949 and 1978, and the reform era that followed.
The remaining chapters are thematically ordered in terms of tenancy,
labor and labor efficiency, agricultural production and production effi-
ciency, and credit, all of which were important economic issues facing
Chinese agriculture in the 1930s.
On farm tenancy and labor, Chap. 6 by Minjie Yu and Hao Hu exam-
ines tenancy issues; Chap. 7 by Hao Hu and Weiwei Zheng evaluates
regional differences in surplus agricultural labor; Chap. 8 by Hao Hu and
Zhongwei Yang investigates poverty and inequality by providing measures
of the Gini coefficient and Engel coefficients.
Production and production efficiency are explored in Chap. 9 where
Hisatoshi Hoken and Qun Su examine the data using Box–Cox transfor-
mation to determine if there is evidence for an inverse relationship between
crop yields and farm size. Chapter 10 by Hao Hu and Minjie Yu tackles
the problem of economies of size and scale by generating production coef-
ficients on land and labor to determine elasticities and the substitution
between land and labor.
Credit issues are explored in Chap. 11, by Calum G. Turvey and Hong
Fu, who estimate the endogeneity between credit supply, credit demand in
relation to agricultural productivity, and special expenditures on wedding
and funerals.
The last two chapters before concluding provide comparative analy-
ses between agricultural conditions in the 1930s and the modern era.
Chapter 12 by Hao Hu and Feng Zhang examines cropland utilization
and productivity, and Chap. 13, by Hao Hu and Funing Zhong, pro-
vides a comparison of the two eras in terms of changes in agricultural
production including cropping structures, labor productivity, technol-
ogy and so on. The book concludes with Chap. 14.
These chapters represent what we believe to be the initial round of
analysis; no doubt more studies will be forthcoming. All told, the chapters
either provide new insights into Republican-era agriculture or confirm
existing observations. As is normal with an edited volume, the chapters
x PREFACE
represent the individual and independent works of the contributing
authors. Our role as editors was to edit and streamline the papers into a
reasonable flow, and we thank the authors for their cooperation through-
out this process.
Nanjing, China Hao Hu
Nanjing, China Funing Zhong
Ithaca, NY Calum G. Turvey
a
cknowledgments
We have many people to thank. The empirical works provided in this book
were the end result of years of preparation. Writing the actual chapters was
probably the easiest part, so much is owed to the many scholars and stu-
dents who contributed to the funding, preservation, and compilation of
the data. Atop this list is Professor Sumio Kuribayashi of Tokyo
International University (TIU), who as principal researcher led the initial
team to preserve Buck’s data. This was a five-year effort starting in 2002
and ending around 2007. Professor Kuribayashi arranged the first tranche
of funding from the Grants-in-Aid Program of the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science (JSPS) under project # 15402020. Under his lead
the original preservation study with Professors Hao Hu, Funing Zhong,
Yingheng Zhou, and Qun Su from NJAU took root. This included an
exchange program, with Takashi Osato from TIU and Wei Wei Liu from
Nanjing Agricultural University being the first to partake.
Over the years that followed, further funding was provided by a grant
from the National Social Sciences Foundation of China for the project
Research on Construction of Agricultural Production System and
Agricultural Products Consumption Pattern Characterized by Low
Carbon Emission (Grant No. 10zd&031). It is also supported by a grant
for the Construction of Buck’s Survey Database, a Major Research
Program of Humanities and Social Sciences, NJAU (Grant No.
SKZD201201).
There are many students and faculty at NJAU to thank, but more than
any we thank Weiwei Zheng and Minjie Yu who, as graduate students,
undertook the tremendous burden of organizing dozens of undergraduate
xi