An Example of the
Chinese Tenant-Peasant's Life
(March 1927)¹

Place: Xixiang, Xiangtan, Hunan
Time: The fifteenth year of the Republic

A hypothetical case: A hard-working and capable tenant-peasant in his prime
rents 15 mu² of land (the amount of land that can be tilled with the manpower of
one tenant-peasant) plus a sizable vegetable plot, a hilly area in which to collect
firewood, and a thatched hut to live in. Both of this tenant-peasant's parents are
dead, and he has only a wife and a son. The wife cooks and raises pigs for
him, and the son of twelve or thirteen looks after the oxen for him. This
tenant-peasant is able to till the 15 mu of fields he has rented without any
hired help. Because he is poor, he rents the land from a dealer, so there is no
rent deposit to be paid, and the rent, according to the general rule in this area,
is 70 percent of the crops.

Part I: Expenditure

1. Food grain. The annual grain consumption of the tenant-peasant and his
wife is 7 dan 2 dou³ each. The child's grain consumption is 3 dan 6 dou. The
total amount of grain consumed by all three is 18 dan. Grain is currently priced
at 4 yuan per dan, so the total cost of food is 72 yuan (in silver, as below).

2. Lard. Three people consume at least 1 jin⁴ of lard a month, which makes
12 jin a year. At 25 fen⁵ per jin, the total cost is 3 yuan.
3. Salt. Three people consume at least 2 jin of salt a month, 24 jin a year. At
13 fen (430 cash in copper coins) per jin, the total cost is 3.12 yuan.
4. Lamp oil. At least 1 jin of kerosene a month, 12 jin a year. At 7 fen per jin
(230 cash), the total cost is 84 fen.
5. Tea. At least 10 jin a year. At 20 fen per jin, the total cost is 2 yuan.
6. Wages. Thirty-six yuan. (If this peasant did not rent land to till, he could
work for someone else and earn a wage of 36 yuan a year. By not working [for
others] he loses this wage.)
7. Seed. Four sheng⁷ per mu of land, 6 dou for 15 mu, worth 2.4 yuan in silver.
8. Fertilizer. One yuan in silver buys 2,400 jin of ox dung to cover one mu of
land, so the cost of manure for 15 mu is 15 yuan. (If he uses pig manure, 1 yuan
buys 2,000 jin to cover 1 mu, for a total cost of 15 yuan. If he uses soya beans,
the price is 9 yuan per dan, and each dan of unhulled beans yields 3 sheng. One
mu of land needs 6 dan of unhulled soya beans for a yield of 1 dou 8 sheng of
beans. At 9 fen per sheng, the total cost is 1.62 yuan, and for 15 mu of land it
would come to 24.30 yuan. If he uses dried vegetable, or rapeseed bricks, 1 yuan
buys 40 jin at 2.5 fen per jin. Each mu uses 50 jin of this, which costs 1.25 yuan.
The total cost for 15 mu of land is 18.75 yuan. But a tenant-peasant who rents 15
mu of land would not be able to afford soya beans or rapeseed bricks anyway.) In
addition, for 15 mu of land it is necessary to spread 1,500 jin of lime, which costs
2 yuan per 1,000 jin, for a total cost of 3 yuan. These two items added together
make a total cost of 18 yuan.
9. Draft animals. To rent oxen with a rice seedling guarantee (which means a
guarantee to plow until the land is ready for rice seedlings to be transplanted)
costs one yuan per mu of land, from which 24 fen must be deducted for the cost
of manpower. (The cost of the manpower should properly be included in the
oxen rental fee, but for the purposes of this hypothetical case we have assumed
that no extra help is in fact hired. So this tenant-peasant must go to someone
else's house to do odd jobs to compensate for this plowhand cost, while labor
costs have been excluded from the oxen rental fee.) This comes to 76 fen per mu,
totaling 11.4 yuan for 15 mu of land. Generally speaking, a tenant-peasant renting 15 mu of land raises an ox himself and has that ox provide him with manure, so why doesn't he do so? Let's do the calculations on the assumption that he
raises one ox. An ox of medium quality would require a capital outlay of 40
yuan. At the current local interest rate of 8 dan of grain a year for 100 liang of
pure silver, 40 yuan, equivalent to 30.7 liang of silver (1.3 big foreign dollars
equals one liang of silver) would attract interest of 2.456 dan of grain a year. At
a price of 4 yuan per dan of grain, the total cost is 9.824 yuan.8
10. Farm tool expenses
a. Two plows. Two plows a year are needed to till 15 mu of land. The
plow crescents cost 10 fen apiece. Another 10 fen goes for the plow
bottom, plowtail, and plow head. To make the parts into a plow, you need
a carpenter, for whom the pay and food cost is 34.4 fen. (A carpenter is
paid 1 yuan for 7 units of work. Each unit of work costs 14.3 fen plus 20
fen for food.) Plowshare and moldboard cost 40 fen. To treat the plow
you use half a jin of tung oil, which costs 15 fen (30 fen per jin). The total
cost of one plow is 1.093 yuan, and two plows come to 2.186 yuan.
b. An iron rake. Costs 6 yuan and can be used for 10 years, making an
average annual expense of 60 fen.
c. Two rake heads. Each one weighs 5 jin, and one yuan buys 4 jin at
25 fen per jin. Thus each rake head costs 1.25 yuan. Two rake heads cost
2.50 yuan. They can be used for 3 years, making the average annual
expense 83.3 fen.
d. Three hoes.
i. One digging hoe, which weighs 5 jin. One yuan buys 4
jin at 25 fen per jin. Thus 5 jin costs 1.25 yuan. It can be used
for 10 years and must be reinforced once a year with steel,
which costs 7 fen (230 cash), or 70 fen for 10 years. This makes
a total outlay of 1.95 yuan, which, averaged over a period of 10
years, comes out to 19.5 fen per year.
ii. One farming hoe, which weighs 3.5 jin and costs 87.5 fen. It
can be used for 5 years and must be reinforced with steel once a
year at a cost of 7 fen (230 cash), which comes to 35 fen for 5
years. The total outlay for 5 years is 1.225 yuan, making an average annual cost of 24.5 fen.
iii. One pick hoe weighing 1.5 jin and costing 37.5 fen. It can
be used for 2 years, the average annual cost coming to 18.75 fen.
The total annual cost of these three hoes is 62.75 fen.
e. One threshing bucket. The wood costs one yuan, and nails and pincer cost one yuan. The carpenter's pay is 1.14 yuan for 8 units of work
(at 7 units of work for one yuan). The carpenter's food money for 8 units
of work is 1.60 yuan. Three jin of tung oil for treating [the wood] costs
one yuan. One threshing shield (inclusive cost 5 strings of cash, calculated at 3 strings 300 per yuan), 1.50 yuan. The total cost is 7.24 yuan. The
bucket can be used for 20 years, so the average annual cost is 36.2 fen.
f. Six Dan¹ of bamboo baskets. At 3 Dan for 1 yuan, 6 Dan cost 2
yuan. They can be used for 20 years, making an average annual cost of
10 fen.
g. Six Dan of webs. Each Dan costs 100 coppers, making a total of
600 coppers, which is equivalent to 18 fen. They can be used for only one
year.
h. Four Dan of winnowing fans. Two Dan are "Chang Xie" and 2 Dan
are "Gou Suo." Each costs 10 fen, for a total of 40 fen. They can be used for
one year.
i. Three picking fans. One is for pulling the grain, one for drying the
grain, and one for containing grain. The total cost is 1 yuan. They can be
used for 10 years, making the annual average 10 fen.
j. One windmill. The cost is 6 yuan. It can be used for 60 years at an
average annual cost of 10 fen.
k. Grain-drying tools. One sifter, one smoothing harrow, and two
toothed harrows cost a total of 1.50 yuan. They can be used for 10 years
at an average annual cost for each year of 15 fen.
l. One nanpan. It can be used for 5 years at an average annual cost of
20 fen.
m. Two rice sifters. Two yuan, to be used for 10 years at an average
annual cost of 20 fen.
n. One shovel. Two yuan, to be used for 4 years at an average annual
cost of 50 fen.
o. One tilt hammer. Two yuan, to be used for 30 years at an average
annual cost of 6.7 fen.
The total annual expenditure for the 15 types of farm tools listed above each
year is 6.655 yuan.

Note [by Mao]: The expenditure for farm tools is certainly a large one, but
interest on loans to buy them is an even bigger expense. The total of these 15
farm implements is 39.556 yuan. At a monthly interest rate of 2 percent, the
interest comes to 9.49 yuan a year. The cost of the tools themselves is high enough, but if interest were added into the calculations of the total expenditures
it would come to a startling sum. Interest has not been figured into this article.
11. Miscellaneous expenditures. Customary gifts for seasonal festivities and
for weddings and funerals, wine and cigarettes for entertaining visitors, plus
other miscellaneous expenditures come to at least 1 yuan a month, or 12 yuan a
year.

The total cost for the 11 items above is 167.3655 yuan.

Note: As for clothing, three people need at least six zhang of cloth each year
(that is, two bolts). Excluding the cost for dying and tailoring, this comes to 4.80
yuan at 8 fen per chi.11 In the case of ordinary poor peasants, however, their
clothing is made by the women [in the family] and rarely is any money spent on
cloth. Therefore this item of expenditure is not included in the above calculations.

Part II: Income

1. Receipts from the land. Each mu yields 4 dan of grain (paddy rice)
annually, and 15 mu yield a total of 60 dan of grain. Rent is paid with 42 dan (70
percent), leaving 18 dan for the peasant himself. At 4 yuan per dan, the total is
72 yuan.
2. Raising pigs. Forty yuan a year (a minimum of 3.30 yuan a month).
3. Cutting firewood or working as a porter during the winter season. Twenty
yuan can be earned in the course of a winter.
4. Savings in wages and food money. Because the peasant goes out to cut
firewood or to work as porter during the months of September, October, and
November and does not eat and work at home, food money and wages for one
person should be deducted from the previous items of expenditure. The cost of
food each month is 2.74 yuan (2.40 yuan for 6 dou of grain, 25 fen for 1 jin of
oil, and 9 fen for 11 liang of salt). The total for 3 months is 8.22 yuan. Wages are
2.50 yuan a month, making a total of 7.50 yuan for 3 months. These two items
add up to a total of 15.72 yuan.

The four items listed above add up to a total of 147.72 yuan.

Part III: Conclusion

Calculating income against expenditure leaves a shortfall of 19.6455 yuan.
Even an annual income of 147.72 yuan is possible only provided the following six conditions are met:
1. Absolutely no natural calamities of any kind such as flood, drought, wind- storms, hailstorms, insect blight, and plant disease
2. Robust health, and absolutely no illness that would affect one's ability to
work
3. Being shrewd and good at adjusting (the local way of saying "good at
calculating" is "good at adjusting")
4. No disease and death amongst the pigs and oxen raised
5. Sunny days and no rain during the winter season
6. Hard work all year round, with no holidays whatsoever

Actually it is very rare that all six conditions are met, especially numbers 3
and 5. There are always more simple and honest ones than shrewd ones among
the poor tenant-peasants.

In the countryside today, where the competition for survival is very fierce,
this factor is of crucial importance to a peasant's rise or fall. Moreover, there is
often an unbroken spell of wet and windy weather over the winter, which causes
more suffering among poor tenant-peasants, greatly reducing their income from
cutting wood and working as a porter. As to the first condition of natural calamities, the second of illness, and the fourth of animal diseases, all of them are
basically inevitable. The sixth condition shows that a Chinese tenant-peasant
lives a worse life than that of an ox, for an ox gets some rest during the year,
while a man gets none at all. But in reality not every tenant-peasant can work so
hard all year with no rest, and as soon as one so much as slacks off for a moment,
a loss of income immediately follows. This is the real reason why, living a worse
life than that of the tenant-peasants in any other country in the world, many
Chinese tenant-peasants are being forced to leave the land and become soldiers,
bandits, or vagrants.

Under the present system of heavy rents in China, such a life for the tenantpeasant-in which he earns a small amount of his income from his main occupation and the greater part of his income from sidelines, and at the end of the year
suffers a large loss-is extremely widespread. It is only because the tenant-peasants themselves frequently do not count their wages in their own calculations
that many of them exert their utmost efforts all year to struggle for survival
through what they earn from side jobs, yet feel they are just managing to make
ends meet and not suffering any great loss.

(This article is based on an interview with Mr. Zhang Lianchu, a tenant-peasant).

---

Notes

This document was first published as a separate booklet in a series put out by the Central
Peasant Movement Training Institute in March 1927. Our source is the text as reproduced
in Mao Zedong nongcun diaocha wenji, pp. 28-34.
6. Here Mao gives the equivalent in wen, the traditional copper coins for which we
have used the standard English equivalent of "cash." Throughout the present text, the rate
of exchange is assumed to be approximately 3,300 cash for 1 yuan. This is stated most
clearly in paragraph 10e, but in the present example, it will be seen that 430 divided by.13
yields a ratio of 3308.
7. A sheng is a unit of dry measure for grain equivalent to 0.1 dou (1 liter).
8. The liang (Chinese ounce, or "tael") of silver was a traditional unit of accounting.
Regarding "big foreign dollars," see the relevant note to Mao's report of May 19, 1926.
The practice of charging interest in kind on loans to the peasants was common at this time
in the Chinese countryside. The rate of interest in monetary terms can easily be calculated
from the data in this paragraph, and comes to 24.56 percent. This is consistent with the
figure of 2 percent a month given below by Mao in his note to paragraph 10.

--- Notes

1. Here the Chinese text has simply the year, 1926, when the data were collected. We
have preferred to place it in the chronological sequence of Mao's writings under the date of
first publication.

2. A mu is an area of 0.167 acre (0.0667 hectare).

3. Dan and dou are units of dry measure for grain. A dan (represented by the character
also meaning "stone," read shi in other contexts) is equivalent to one hectoliter, a dou to
one decaliter. A different character, also read dan, and commonly referring to a unit of
weight, occurs in paragraph 10f below. A note in the Chinese edition warns, however, that
the usage of these two terms is not consistent or uniform throughout this text.

4. In recent times, a Chinese pound or jin has been equal to half a kilogram, or 1.1
pounds avoirdupois, but Mao may have been using a more traditional measure, which was
somewhat heavier.

5. The term fen refers to a modern-style currency unit equivalent to .01 yuan.

9. One "string" of copper cash traditionally consisted of 1,000 such coins, strung
together through the hole in the middle.

10. Here, as noted above under paragraph 1, the character dan which normally refers
to a unit of weight is employed. We capitalize this term to distinguish it from the unit of
volume pronounced in the same way.

11. One zhang consisted of 10 chi or Chinese feet. The official equivalent at this time
was 141 English inches, but the exact length varied substantially with time and place.