The present article analyzes The Survey Reports on Real Conditions of Rural Communities in Northeast China, then, placed under the rule of the Manchuko government. As I introduce the content of the reports, I will focus on the taxes and other obligatory payments imposed on the peasants, and discuss the possible ways to utilize the reports in our attempt to grasp Chinese agriculture and describe the economic history of rural communities in concrete numerical values. This will go along, more or less, with the discussion paper I published under the same title. So for further details, therefore, refer to the paper. The code numbers of the charts herein quoted correspond to those in the paper.
The Survey Reports on Real Conditions of Rural Communities consists of three different reports ( referred to as the Reports hereafter ), whose titles are as follows:
1) The Survey Report on Real Conditions of Rural Communities for the First Year of Kohtoku (1934)
2) The Survey Report on Real Conditions of Rural Communities for the Third Year of Kohtoku (1936)
3) The Survey Report on Real Conditions of Rural Communities, Conducted by Apprentices of the Counties Technical Staff for the Third, Fourth, and Fifth years of Kohtoku (1936, 1937, and 1938).
In 1) and 2) the survey was carried out on more than 1,600 peasant families extracted from 37 villages all over Manchuria. The survey for ‚P) was conducted mainly in northern Manchuria while 2) was geographically more extensive and covered 1,095 families ( 6,911 people ). The area in which survey 2) covered ranged from Aihun that was located near the Soviet border in the north to Zhuang He on the Liaotung Peninsula in the south. Detailed interviews were conducted about each peasant's family history, family members, acreage, produce, tenancy situation, hired hands, household economy, taxes and other obligatory payments. The results were made into numerical reference materials, which occupy the section under "Investigation into Households" in the Reports. The information about each village's history, politics, economy and state of the community were made into General Reports ( 21 volumes ). These are mainly descriptive reference materials. Consequently, we can use not only statistical figures but also descriptive materials, through which we can delve into the realities of rural communities and people's life therein. Special attention should be paid to the fact that once a village was sampled, every household in the village was investigated. Thus, the households belonging to all the layers of the social hierarchy were covered in the Reports. This is a point where the Reports differ from Buck's survey in which only standard peasants were picked up as samples. The Reports for the first and third years of Kohtoku had become the basic reference materials for various agricultural reports that would be published in later years. For us, thus, to use the Reports may mean that we are able to review the original reference materials of many agricultural reports published during the years of Manchukuo.
The number of households per village ranged from 20 to 90, and the population from over one hundred to five hundred. The survey team was composed of eleven groups. A group had five to eight people. Each group, after finishing a preparatory research in the county government and treasury office, went out on a tour of 10 days to a fortnight accompanied by a garrison and interpreters. The manual that was used in these surveys still remains enabling us to examine the Reports in detail. For example, there is an explanation about the problems that may confront the surveyors at each stage of research, as well as definitions of the concepts of the research items.
The previously mentioned "Investigation into Households" is composed of 16 charts of statistics.( The content of each chart is shown in table 2. of the discussion paper. ) Following the 16 aggregate tables for each village, there are descriptions about the general condition of the village, weights and measures, acreage, items and rates of taxation, and prices of grain. Through analysis of these aggregate tables and the various types of information, there appear concrete shapes of agricultural production and household economy. And the achieved results will help to understand the rural communities and their economy not merely of the Manchukuo days but also of Manchuria under the rule of Zhang Zuolin and Zhang Xueliang , or even they can lead to the analysis of agricultural communities of the Huabei region of China geographically located close to Manchuria.
The first problem we should consider is from what viewpoint we treat the substantial amount of statistical materials the Reports contain. The present report focuses on the taxes and other obligatory payments imposed on the peasants, the contents of the impositions were examined, and a basic investigation into how much they weighed in the peasants household economy was performed. It is necessary to consider the household incomes and outgoing expenses, or, more concretely, their incomes from sales of their produce or from labor, their household expenses, cash lent or borrowed, tenancy relationship, etc. This method would enable us to grasp organically the various statistics contained in the Reports.
It would be interesting for students of Chinese history to consider taxes and other obligatory payments. As the Chinese tax collecting system is fundamentally based upon a "sending-up method," it is hard to find out from the government revenue reports how much a peasant actually had to pay. The figures for tax collection stated in many official documents are nothing more than what the central or local government was able to amass, and in the process of sending up taxes, embezzlement called Zhong Pao was most commonly practiced. Therefore, it is very important that the Reports gave the figures they obtained from actually interviewing the peasants.
When we examined the aggregate tables in the Reports, the following points were noticed. During the times of the Qing Dynasty, there were various kinds of official manors and banner lands developed in the region. The taxation on those lands differed greatly. But, according to the Reports, they had disposed of a greater part of these lands by around 1921, had incorporated them into privately owned property, and placed them under one taxation system. And, the taxation system used during the Zhang Zuolin / Zhang Xueliang years was taken over by Manchukuo. Therefore, to investigate into the realities of taxation in the rural communities during the Manchukuo years is automatically to look into those of the Zhang Zuolin / Zhang Xue-liang years as well.
A close review of the taxes and other obligatory payments levied on the peasants from February 4, 1935 to January 2, 1936 will reveal the following. The taxation systems above the county level were unified but there was a great variation both in items and in amounts at the village level. The peasants were taxed for such a variety of items as : the village office, the hamlet office, the police office, the agriculture association, founding schools, maintaining roads, watching crops, the militia, doorplates, households, and the national flag. These taxes are thought to have fallen considerably heavily on the peasants' shoulders. As is shown in the separate chart, the tax for the village office in a village in Xinmin County occupied more than 80% of the total taxes. There were only four villages where it occupied less than 30% ( in Taonan County, Huachuan County, Pashan County, and Ningchen County ). In those days, not all the taxes were paid in money; some taxes were paid in kind, or in labor. For example, a tax of 528 days of labor was collected at a 34 family hamlet in Yushu County. This would give an insight into the realities of taxation levied at a village or hamlet level, something no administrative documents could clarify. As this single example shows, the Reports could be used as invaluable resources of information when we try to elucidate the household economy of the peasants families of those days.
As mentioned above, we will have to expand the targets of our consideration into statistical data of the cash account books and the sales of produce, and relate data to each other, in order to delve further into the problems of taxation. I believe that such work will give us a precious clue in our attempt at the numerical grasp of the peasants household economy in the 1930s. In addition, it has also become my subject of research to consider the side of production as well. The necessity of this was pointed out to me by participants in the section meeting.
(Hitotsubashi University, Faculty of Economics)