Land and Labor Allocation in three Wuxi Villages

Three villages in Wuxi were surveyed in 1940 by the Shanghai Office of the Japanese South Manchurian Railway Company (SMR), a research organization active in areas of China then occupied by the Japanese government.^[32] These villages lay within a one kilometer radius of the market town of Rongxiang zhen , approximately eight kilometers from the west gate of Wuxi City.^[33] This was a highly commercialized and densely populated area, yet the large majority of households still depended primarily upon rice/wheat agriculture and household-based subsidiary activities, with sericulture the

[31] Lu Guanying, "Jiangsu Wuxixian ershinianlai zhi siye guan," Nongshang gongbao 8, no. 1 (Aug. 15, 1921), articles and translations section, p. 45; Gongshang banyuekan 2, no. 15 (Aug. 1, 1930), investigation section, p. 3; and SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken noson jittai chosa hokokusho (Shanghai, 1941), p. 11.

[32] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken . For a broader discussion of the research activities of the South Manchurian Railway Company in China, see Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985).

[33] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 14–15.

most important among these, for the bulk of their yearly incomes. Of the 80 households in these villages, 75 engaged in farming; they constituted the sample with which the Japanese researchers worked.^[34]

Although there is some cause for concern as to whether or not the conditions in these villages still reflected economic patterns as they had evolved before the effects of the depression and the Japanese occupation, the researchers themselves were highly sensitive to this issue. They explored available secondary sources on the percentage of land devoted to mulberries before the depression and found estimates ranging from one fifth to one third for various locales.^[35] In the survey villages in 1940, 22.5 percent of arable land was devoted to mulberries, a finding within the range of predepression figures.^[36] Even though mulberry acreage declined during the years when the depression affected silk prices most severely, that is, from 1930 to 1932, by 1940 peasants were restoring mulberry fields to their former position within the agrarian cropping regime.^[37] On the issue of prices for agricultural goods, the researchers reported not only 1939 data but also 1933 data collected in Wuxi by the Nationalist government in an effort to determine effects of inflationary trends caused by the Japanese occupation.^[38]

As elsewhere in Wuxi, most families in the Japanese-surveyed villages combined rice/wheat farming with mulberry cultivation and cocoon rearing. Rice was grown once yearly during the summer months. Then, after the fall harvest, peasants pumped their rice paddies dry and planted winter wheat on all or some of the land. Mulberries were planted in "field fashion" in Wuxi. Trees were not grown on embankments between rice fields, as in the older sericulture districts to the south of Wuxi, in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Rather, a portion of arable land that could have been used for grain cultivation was used instead for mulberry trees. While the trees could be pruned and fertilized in off-peak periods of late fall, winter, and early spring, the first monthlong busy period for mulberries, during which the trees were stripped of their leaves for silkworm feeding, came from late April to late May, coinciding precisely with rice seedling preparation. In June, cocoons were marketed, wheat harvested, and rice seedlings transplanted, giving the peasants no time to recover from their extremely busy monthlong period of silkworm feeding and cocoon raising. Peasants raised a second cocoon crop in summer or, ideally, in early fall, when the mulberry regrowth was fuller. Fall crops

[34] Ibid., pp. 25–26.

[35] Ibid., p. 11.

[36] Ibid., table 1, following the text.

[37] Ibid., pp. 9–11, 18–19. Figures reported by the SMR research group indicate that about 378,000 mu were devoted to mulberry in 1927, 30 percent of all cultivated land in Wuxi. This figure fell steadily until 1932, when only 84,000 mu were cropped to mulberries. By the late 1930s, mulberry land was up again to 240,000 mu .

[38] Ibid., pp. 9–10. I shall also say more about the reconstruction of prices in note 43 below.

first became possible in Wuxi in the late 1910s, with the introduction of refrigeration and delayed incubation of silkworm eggs. The fall round of silkworm raising usually came in late August and ended in mid-September, long before the late October rice harvest. Since late summer/early fall was a less busy time for grain cultivation, this round of cocoon raising was not nearly as taxing for peasant families as in the spring.^[39]

To relate data from the Japanese survey to the previous discussion of peasant rationality, let me pose the question I am most interested in exploring: Precisely what did peasant families gain by engaging in this particular work regime? When considering this issue, I found it useful to construct Table 7.1, comparing income, production costs, and labor usage for rice/wheat farming and mulberry culivation combined with silkworm raising.^[40] The main point I wish to make with the comparison is that mulberry cultivation with silkworm raising brought slightly higher returns per mu than rice/wheat farming (9.25 yuan for rice/wheat versus 11.96 yuan for coccons) but fewer returns per labor day (0.27 yuan for rice/wheat versus 0.19 yuan for cocoons). Moreover, earnings from wage labor in agriculture were also higher, averaging 0.25 yuan per labor day.^[41] We see a situation, therefore, much like that observed by economists elsewhere—peasants who worked at certain tasks, in this case those of sericulture, for less than optimal returns to labor.^[42] Should we conclude from this finding that peasants were "irra-

[39] Ibid., pp. 55, 61, 69–70, 72, 74.

[40] Table 7.1 originally appeared in Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 122; most of the data are derived from the SMR survey report. For a full accounting of all the calculations, see "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," pp. 122–24. Philip C. C. Huang (Peasant Family and Rural Development , p. 127) has argued that my original calculation for labor days spent in sericulture in this table was too low because I failed to take into account a sufficient number of days for pruning the trees and also the days in the growing cycle of silkworms when they rested. He then adds 28 days to my original estimate of 52 days to come up with a total of 80 days for mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising. I agree with Huang that the days silkworms rested (an additional 11 days for the spring and fall cycles combined) should be added to the total and I have done this in my calculations here. However, I am less sanguine about his decision to add an additional 17 days for pruning the trees. Villagers in neither survey discussed here (for more on the second survey, see the next section) said that they spent a total of 30 days yearly (Huang's estimate) working the mulberry fields; by contrast, they regularly gave a number in the range of five to thirteen days (see Table 7.1 and Table 7.5, labor for mulberry cultivation). What the villagers did say very often when questioned about their work in sericulture is that they spent 30 days in the spring season raising silkworms, an estimate which I interpret to have included all the work involved, including the stripping (or "pruning") of the trees to get leaves to feed to their silkworms. What seems to have happened in Huang's method of calculating, therefore, is that he counts the days during the silkworm raising cycles when leaves were stripped from the trees as labor days for both sericulture and work in the mulberry fields, to get a total of 80 days rather than my estimate of 63.

[41] The figure of 0.25 yuan for day labor in agriculture is the average found for central China's rice/wheat region by John Lossing Buck's 1929–33 survey of agricultural conditions throughout China. It is cited in SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , p. 93.

[42] Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization .

tional"? I would argue that we should not, and at this point, take into careful account the problems of population density and scarcity of other options for earning cash income to understand why peasant families in Wuxi undertook sericulture.^[43]

[43] In order to dispel doubts that price figures in Table 7.1 may have been atypical and hence relevant only for the postdepression period in Wuxi, I have also computed price figures for a sample of 146 households in Wuxi in 1928 and 1929, selected from the Guoli Zhongyang Yangiuyuan survey. This second survey is explained more fully in the next section. Prices for rice, wheat, and cocoons were all slightly higher in 1928 and 1929 than in 1939, but the crucial comparison of earnings per labor day between rice/wheat farming and cocoon rearing remains valid. In fact, it tips even more dramatically in favor of rice/wheat farming producing higher returns to labor, with the average being 0.71 yuan as opposed to 0.28 yuan for cocoons. The even larger margin arises primarily because wheat prices were higher by about 55 percent in 1928–29 than in the postdepression period, while the prices for rice and cocoons were higher by only about 20 percent. Another point worth noting concerning calculations in Table 7.1 is that I have purposely excluded land price as a production cost, because price figures for rice/wheat land and mulberry land were nearly identical. I have confirmed this fact via an analysis of variance test on land prices from the Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan survey of 1929, which showed no significant difference between prices for the two types of land. Finally, interplanting mulberry with other crops, a strategy that might have lowered land costs for mulberry culture by raising total yield, was rare in Wuxi because local farmers planted their mulberry trees close together, leaving no room for other crops. This is substantiated by the Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan survey, which demonstrates that other crops such as peas, beans, and potatoes were not grown with mulberries, but rather were raised on small supplemental plots.

First of all, let us consider population issues and average size of farm holdings. Although gazetteer figures indicate that Wuxi lost as much as one half to two thirds of its population during the Taiping period, by the 1920s former levels of population density had been completely restored.^[44] The amount of available arable land per capita in Wuxi in 1929 stood at 1.3 mu , a figure identical to that reported for the late eighteenth century. This made Wuxi the second most densely populated county within Jiangsu Province.^[45] An important by-product of dense population was the small size of peasant farming units. In the SMR-surveyed villages, average farm size was 2.5 mu , approximately 0.2 hectare, or slightly more than one-third of an acre. Moreover, no single farm was larger than 7 mu , and 72 percent of the farming households owned 3 mu or less.^[46] Even by the standards of the Lower Yangzi region, where land was fertile and well irrigated and thus capable of supporting larger populations than in many other areas, these were very small farming units.^[47]

The small size of farms in Wuxi caused the Japanese researchers to consider carefully what other methods were used to augment family incomes. What they found was a fairly consistent pattern of subsidiary activities undertaken by village households. In terms of income-generating capacity, sericulture was most important, usually accounting for 50 percent or more of a family's cash earnings.^[48] There were other important trends under way as

[44] The estimate of population loss in Wuxi during the taiping period is calculated from cadastral figures found in Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi 8:6–7. For a more precise accounting of the figures involved, see Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 84.

[45] Chen Huayin, "Jiangsusheng renkou yu yiken tianmu zhi xilian," Tongji yuebao 1, no. 3 (May 1929):44–48.

[46] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 23, 88.

[47] The SMR researchers had already surveyed villages in three other Jiangsu counties, where they found the average size of landholdings to be 6.4 mu (Jiading), 5.3 mu (Changshu), and 9.6 mu (Songjiang). They were quite surprised by the small size of farming units they observed in Wuxi. See SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , p. 23.

[48] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 103–4.

well, with a high proportion of village men working away from home on a permanent basis, often as clerks or factory workers in Shanghai. But their yearly cash incomes were still lower on average than those generated through cocoon sales.^[49] Men could also remain in the villages to hire themselves out as agricultural wage labor, but because land was scarce, this was done only at peak seasons among village households as a means of satisfying temporary labor needs. The number of days men could work at such tasks was extremely limited and, in comparison to sericulture, provided only small amounts of supplementary cash income.^[50]

Given the constraints of peasant life in Wuxi, it thus appears that sericulture enabled peasants to better meet their subsistence requirements by increasing the total product of their family labor. First of all, sericulture employed women in an occupation that produced relatively higher cash earnings than cotton cloth production. When we compare the daily income from sericulture with that from cotton weaving, we see, on average, that women were able to earn only 0.02 yuan per day making cotton cloth versus 0.19 yuan from sericulture.^[51] In turn, peasants used most of their cash income from sericulture to purchase rice and other items necessary to satisfy immediate household consumption demands. Sixty percent of all cash income was spent on food, and most of the rest went to purchase clothing and other household goods. There is no evidence to suggest that these households had accumulated any substantial savings, and only 0.8 percent of cash income went to productive investments in agriculture.^[52] Rent obligations also figured into this picture for many families, putting a further strain on the capacity for self-sufficiency in grain production. Overall, about 25 percent of the land in these villages was rented, and 10 percent of the rice produced yearly went to rent payments.^[53]

The issue of what constitutes "survival capacity" for peasant households, or, put another way, their relative level of subsistence, is a highly volatile topic in the literature on peasant decision making. I cannot attempt to give the definitive answer to the question here. But to get at least some sense of the importance of sericulture in Wuxi in assuring what I would call "basic subsistence," I shall consider evidence concerning grain consumption both in China at large and in Wuxi in particular.

In the early 1930s, John Lossing Buck documented yearly adult grain consumption for China as a whole: it ranged from 390 to 952 jin . His figures

[49] Ibid., pp. 99–104.

[50] Ibid., pp. 88–95; tables 2 and 3, following the text.

[51] The figure for cotton weaving comes from Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 11. The sericulture figure is found in Table 7.1 above.

[52] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 122–24; table 15, part 2, following the text.

[53] Ibid., pp. 25, 144–47.

include not only the main cereal grains of rice, wheat, and millet but also potatoes, beans, and peas. In many areas of China, these latter three items often made up a large proportion of daily consumption for many peasant households. This could be because of the relative infertility of the land or because rent payments were usually demanded in the highest quality grain a given locale produced, leaving the poorest of local peasant families to consume coarser foodstuffs. Commenting on these figures and comparing them to provincial-level data for the 1950s, Dwight H. Perkins has concluded that about 400 jin of grain per adult per year is a fairly accurate estimate of China's "minimum subsistence" requirements.^[54]

In the SMR-surveyed villages in Wuxi, the preferred pattern of grain management and consumption for most households was to preserve as much of the rice they produced themselves as they could for their own use. As we have seen, rent obligations took about 10 percent of the rice produced, so that overall the village households had about 29,550 jin of their total production of 32,833 jin left for consumption purposes. They also purchased rice with cash income from sericulture, wheat sales, and other subsidiary employments, amounting to an additional 32,250 jin . When converted to the average amount of rice consumed yearly, this works out to approximately 824 jin of rice per household. Since the average household size was 4.1 members, this meant an average per capita rice consumption figure of only 201 jin . If we convert this to an adult equivalent for purposes of comparison with Buck's data (using Buck's estimate of 77 adult equivalents for a total population of 100), we arrive at a figure of 261 jin for the yearly rice consumption per adult villager. To come up to the minimum subsistence levels suggested by Perkins, Wuxi peasants supplemented their diets with broad beans and peas, which were both locally grown.^[55]

When viewed from this comparative perspective, we find that in terms of quantity of grain consumed, Wuxi villagers were quite near the lower end of the consumption range observed by Buck for China as a whole in the 1930s. Of course, their diet, which had a large proportion of white rice, was of quite high quality by Chinese standards. Relatively speaking, then, just how well off were these peasant households?

It seems fairly clear that as long as the market for Chinese raw silk was doing well, Wuxi peasants would rarely have faced hunger. Moreover, the

[54] This discussion of "minimum subsistence" is drawn from Perkins, Agricultural Development , pp. 14–15, 300–301. In the latter pages, Perkins cites Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume (Nanking, 1937), at length.

[55] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 144–49. The average size of a farming household is found in this same work, table 1 following the text. For Buck's "adult equivalent," see Perkins, Agricultural Development , p. 301. According to Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 1, broad beans (candou ) and peas (wandou ) were both grown in Wuxi in 1929, broad beans being far more common.

grain they had available to them was of high quality, and they themselves must have felt quite satisfied that these sorts of options were available to them. However, when the market for raw silk was doing poorly, this rather fragile, near-subsistence-level system would have collapsed. To demonstrate this, we can consider what would have happened if all mulberry land within the SMR-surveyed villages had been converted back to rice/wheat farming, and sericulture abandoned. Many families in Wuxi took this option during the worst years of the depression. The additional rice that could have been produced on former mulberry land amounted to only 12,300 jin , a figure that falls far short of the 32,250 jin that villagers normally purchased.^[56] This means that if sericulture had been abandoned, peasant families would have had to find other ways to earn supplementary cash income to continue purchasing grain at their accustomed levels. Options that provided returns comparable to sericulture were not readily available within the village itself and, as we have seen, often meant out-migration for male members of individual farming families.^[57]

What I would argue on the basis of these considerations is that in Wuxi by the early twentieth century, sericulture had become a crucial link in a complex system that, in good years, provided moderate levels of subsistence for most farming families. Even though individual workers' earnings were below those to be had through rice/wheat farming, the total product of peasant family labor was raised via sericulture. Peasants tolerated this situation because under conditions of dense population and scarce land, finding ways to better employ peasant women had become essential. Since financial reserves were small or nonexistent and most cash income was spent on food and other basic living expenses, a sudden drop in income caused by falling silk prices would depress living standards for many peasant families in Wuxi and would push some households below basic subsistence requirements.^[58]