CAPITALISM AND THE CHINESE PEASANT
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throws new light on the structure of the powerful lineage in traditional China. A mere 7% of the land held by the Tangs in Ping Shan was in individual hands; the remaining 93% was ancestral land, i.e. land incorporated in the name of a particular ancestor, the income from which is reserved for the exclusive benefit of that ancestor's patrilineal descendants. As the largest private holding was just under 4 acres, private landlordism may be dismissed as insignificant. The distribution of ancestral land is best described by an adaptation of one of Potter's own diagrams:
B Ас
A
E
F
AD
Approximately 4/5 of all the ancestral land is in the name of ancestor D., and is therefore reserved for the benefit of the descendants of E., F., and G.: while almost 1/2 of the total is in the name of ancestor G., its proceeds being reserved to the Six Families which make up his branch. The remaining 1/10 of the ancestral land is distributed in small parcels over the rest of the lineage. Thus, if there are no private landlords in Ping Shan, there is concentration of landholdings, and landlordism on a major scale. Although Potter is at pains to show that the arrival of Western industry and commerce neither initiated nor stimulated the concentration of landholdings in the hands of absentee landlords, he does not stress that the rural economy, in itself, never produced sufficient surpluses to permit the accumulation of wealth on anything approaching this scale; many Chinese proverbs testify to the difficulty of making more than a bare living from agriculture -- while tradi-