The land question in 21st century China : four camps and five scenarios

Abstract

In 1709, the Kangxi Emperor alerted his officials to a ‘serious problem’. ‘It has been nearly 68 years since our dynasty [the Qing] was established. The people have lived in peace and the population has grown by the day, yet the acreage of farmland has not increased accordingly. One person’s land is now farmed by several families. How can they make an adequate living?’, the Emperor asked, and went on to stress: ‘We must find solutions.’1 At the time, China’s population was between 100 and 150 million, the highest it had ever been, but this was only the beginning of a long period of steady demographic growth. A century later, the country had 360 million inhabitants.2 This was an era of general prosperity for Imperial China, yet the problem of supporting a large and growing population with limited farmland posed an unrelenting challenge to Kangxi and his successors.