Lord and Peasant

This article endeavors to trace the rural social transition, the changing relations between landlord and peasant, in early modern China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. These two centuries were chosen not because this era happened to be a period of political turnover from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to the alien Manchu rule (1644-1911), but because of the dramatic changes evident in the countryside. Rural society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been dominated