Land, Taxation, and Economic Coercion in Early China: The Dissolution of Communal Agriculture During the Eastern Zhou Period

Land, Taxation, and Economic Coercion in Early China: The Dissolution of Communal Agriculture During the Eastern Zhou Period Kevin Wilson, New York University 2013 (Master’s Thesis) I encourage anyone interested in reading a pdf version of this paper (~90 pages) to contact me on academia.edu and I’ll send a link or an email. Abstract In this essay, I investigate how communal agriculture transformed into household agriculture during the Eastern Zhou period (770-221 B.C.). With increasing interstate competition, both militaristic and economic, individual city-states were reconstructing social relations in order to increase productive capacity in agriculture and in order to expand their militaries. I demonstrate how the productive prototype of imperial China, viz. the nuclear household laboring on an individual plot of land, rendering military service and taxes in kind, is a political form first instituted by ruling elites during the Eastern Zhou, a form whose emergence is coterminous with the redefinition of intertribal and inter-village social structures and the dissolution of systems of communal agriculture embedded in these structures. I have attempted to rehabilitate the classical viewpoints of Meng Kang 孟康 and Zhang Yan 張晏 (3rd Century A.D.), who understand Eastern Zhou yuan tian 爰田(轅田) policies to involve the dissolution of communal systems of field rotation and distribution, the awarding of individual plots to individual households, and the implementation of two-year and three-year private rotation schemes. I have also put forward a new interpretation of Guan Zhong’s xiang di er cui zheng 相地而衰政 policy in the state of Qi, relating it to yuan tian policies in Jin and Qin. Sources include historically transmitted texts, archaeological findings, and recent secondary literature. Many of the transmitted texts under consideration at first glance appear simply to evidence the kinds of governmental and bureaucratic innovations so famously characteristic of the Eastern Zhou period, but a more careful analysis reveals how the policies being outlined are rooted in earlier social forms and structures. By distinguishing the new from the old, and the idealized from the real, I am trying to move in the direction of properly conceptualizing the social transformations taking place. Keywords: Eastern Zhou, land tenure, communal agriculture, household agriculture, yuan tian爰田 (轅田), xiang di er cui zheng 相地而衰政, taxation, economic coercion, kinship, property relations