So in the West, the persistence and the growth of the have a lot population in terms of their tremendous [INAUDIBLE] of wealth is because of the supremacy of property rights over social policy and political rights. But in China, the first contrast is the persistence of imperial rights over private ownership. So, whereas in the West, we have this tremendous imbalance of wealth, partly because private ownership rights takes precedence over the political needs of the many. In China, you have the persistence of political rights over profit, over private ownership whether it's in the faraway past all the way up to the present. So if you look at the earliest Chinese texts, for example, the Book of Poetry, it talks about how everywhere under Heaven is the King's land, each of those who live on the land as the king's subject. And then, 2500 years later, you still have important to so-called radical thinkers, arguing essentially exactly the same line. All treasures under Heaven are the emperor's personal property. All the people under Heaven are the emperor's people. And the responsibility of the emperor is not so much the accumulation and protection of property under a small number of have a lots, rather it's the distribution of imperial largesse over society as a whole. So this this very important strength in Chinese political economy starts actually starts earlier than Confucius, but he is one of the first to articulate this and in great detail. And he wrote, the head of a state or a noble family worries not about underpopulation, but about uneven distribution, not about poverty, but about instability. For where there is even distribution, there is no such thing as poverty, where there is harmony, there is no such thing as underpopulation, and where there's stability, there is no such thing as regime change. So in other words, legitimacy, for Confucius, dependent on equal distribution. what Mencius later on developed as a sense not so much of human rights, in terms of political rights. But rather of human entitlements where the population as a whole is always entitled because of their, because of their humanhood. To be supported by the state in terms of a guaranteed livelihood, guaranteed clothing, guaranteed work and so on. And as a result, almost every Chinese dynasty from the very earliest under the Qin, to the very last under the Qing, and even after the last dynasty with both the Republic and then especially with the current People's Republic of China. The state has worked very hard in redistributing a large portion of wealth, especially land, to the population as whole population these are distribution policies. known with different names, whether there's jikou shoutian under the Qin-Han, zhantian under the Western Jin, tuntian or more specifically juntian under the Northern Dynasties, to the later distribution of land under the Eight Banner system in the last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty. And then of course, you have land reforming collectivization by the most recent Chinese regime. But this idea of land distribution as opposed to land accumulation, of even distribution rather than uneven accumulation, is an idea which runs very deep in Chinese political economy and in Chinese policy. However, until recently, we didn't have the data to study the distribution of wealth for China as we do in England, in Wales, and the United States. And it's still not possible to show you the equivalent tables of how much wealth does the top 1% of the population have as was the bottom 90% or the bottom 80%. But we do have, we're beginning to have, a much better example of the importance of this equal land distribution, from studies by, a few young scholars, such as Sui, Tang at the University of Iowa, who has accumulated a very good case study from one county out of the 2,000 some odd counties of China. in this case also in Northeast China, a county south of the provincial city capital Harbin called Shuangcheng Harbin is of course the provincial capital of Heilongjiang. and what we'll do now is we'll look first at strong study for an understanding of equal land distribution of Late Imperial China, and then, we'll look at the results of a very recent survey of household wealth in contemporary China. And show how the patterns of property distribution of who gets what are remarkably similar both in the late imperial and in the, and in the contemporary, in contemporary China. And that they are different from the unequal distributions of the have a lots and the have nots of England and Wales and the contemporary United States. So, Shuangcheng is one of the first empirical studies of property distribution in Chinese history. It covers more than 100 village communities, and it documents the important existence and persistence of two patterns. First, the categorization of population into a few sort of a political economic categories. In this case, [INAUDIBLE] and the existence and persistence of within category equality, and between category, inequality. And this allows us both to assess the, a degree of inequality in land distribution in China historically, and to assess the common assumption the regime change, the Chinese revolution in 1949, is leading to increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Maybe true, maybe untrue, we'll do that in the next week. Now, with Shuangcheng, Shuangcheng was a collection of state farms in Heilongjiang, Northeast China. So, in that sense, like the United States it's a frontier county, which is established by sort of state colonies. our data comes not from the immediate first wave of migrants, which was in 1850 to 1830, but from annual population registers which began in the 1870s and the quadrennial land registers which also begin around the same time. Now the Qing state moved the population to Shuangcheng, because of a because of a very well-known fiscal crisis, that the state faced in the early 19th and throughout the 19th century. Which was that the state, as the population was growing, as the population of the dependent population on the state was growing, the state did not have a growth in income from taxation to match the growth of dependent populations. What the state did have was it had wealth in terms of unsettled land in northeast China. And the state therefore decided to move some of this dependent population from the state capital in Beijing from Rehe which was near Beijing where the state had it's Summer Palace. and to move to support these metropolitan bannermen the state also created a group of what we'd called rural bannerman, [FOREIGN]. Where they relocated from elsewhere in Northeast China either directly south of Shuangcheng in Jilin or you go further south in Liaoning province. And it gave, it created two categories of bannermen, one which are metropolitan bannermen from the capitals, the other rural bannermen from northeastern provinces. And for metropolitan bannermen, it gave them 64 hectares of land per household, for rural bannermen it gave them half, 34 hectares of land per household. This is at a time that most Chinese households had less than one hectare. So in other words, one one population receives 60 times the per capita distribution of land in China, the other receive 30 times. So, by any definition, relatively well off. What you see here is the location of Shuangcheng, the red dot, the location of the origins of the Metropolitan bannermen who came from Beijing and Rehe, and the origins of the rural bannermen who came nearby Shuangcheng but also further south of Liaoning. they settled in a 120 Banner Villages in Shuangcheng, which are shown on this map which are located like many sort of many property development sort of schemes. Well, so locate it in a kind of Descartian sort of a set of vertical and horizontal lines. these 120 villages persist today as the most important so-called administrative villages of Shuangcheng County being in charge of some approximately 5, 600 natural villages in the county overall. Now, we have two sets of data that make up this big social science data set that illuminates our the big data discoveries in Week 3. the first are government population registers they are comprised annually. There are all together 260 coded and linked registers, that make up this data set for Shuangcheng and they provide 1.3 million observations of 100,000 linked individual histories. So in other words, we can find your entry in 1866, in 1867, in 1868, perhaps you got married in 1869, perhaps you had children in 1871, perhaps you died in 1910. And we link all these observations together so that we can create life histories, and so, we can study any year between 1866 and 1912 and study to what extent the patterns we find in that year are a product of the patterns before of the linked data that we have beginning in 1866. So what you have here is an example of what these registers look like they as you see, they record the banner affiliation, the place of origin, the ethnicity, the village, the surname, the occupation, the age, household headship, other household members, any vital events. they're quite detailed, and although they're written in hand, they're in a very clear penmanship that's actually much easier to read. The many ah, [COUGH] Chinese, the much Chinese handwriting even today. These data are kept annually and they're kept because, when the state first tried to settle populations in Northeast China, what it discovered was, was that many people volunteered to move to the Northeast so they could get these large land endowments. Once they got them, they would sell the land, and they would move back to Beijing. So as a result, to make sure that the population, settlement population was actually still remaining in Shuangcheng the state decided to do it, registers every year to ascertain whether people were really there and to also compile land registers. To make sure that not only were the people still there in Shuangcheng, but the land that had been assigned them was still farmed by them. So in addition to the 100,000 individuals, which you can trace over time, we also have almost 20,000 physical plots, and 23 coded land registers from 1870, '76, '87, '89. 1906, we have partial registers in between and we can link most of these plots to the land owner in the household register and it's this data set which allows us to understand, examine the distribution of wealth in Shuangcheng. Now, this is only a micro study, but it is a very telling micro-study and it is the first such micro-study for Chinese history and therefore extremely important. what you see here is the Sample Page of the Land Register and you can see again you have village, name of land owner, land type, land size location and so on.
