CAPITALISM AND THE CHINESE PEASANT
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A corollary of the sudden rise in land values is of course a desire on the part of landlords or land manipulators to let or sell their land to the highest bidder. Tenant farmers were traditionally protected by an acknowledged system of secure tenancy, but the sanctions which supported this, though effective enough in the past, are rapidly being weakened now, and tenants' title to the land they farm is becoming increasingly insecure. They are seeking legal, documented contracts to protect their interests against those of the landlords.
Rents were traditionally high; Potter's conclusion is that rent generally amounted to 45% of the crop—and it is clearly only because the system of reckoning rent, based on the potential rice yield of the land rented, has been slow to catch up with modern conditions that vegetable-growers are not paying much more than they are for their fields. As it is, Potter observed a tendency for rents to rise each time a new tenancy is arranged.
In spite of increasing insecurity of tenure, and gradually rising rents, farmers' income has risen with the growth of Hong Kong: Potter, with unquestionable logic, derives the one from the other. But he does not explore the paradox that while the bulk of Hong Kong's development has taken place in the context of laissez-faire capitalism, two factors which have been of crucial benefit to the agricultural community have been the result of direct Government intervention: the Vegetable Marketing Organization (V.M.O.) and the Farmers' Cooperative. The paradox deserves consideration—the more so as Potter himself says that the farmers' reaction to the establishment of the Cooperative "might offer some hint as to the attitude of the peasantry on mainland China to the collectivization of agriculture". Despite farmers' criticisms, Potter's objective assessment is that both the V.M.O. and the Cooperative have been successful and of great value to the farmers. But how then is one to characterise the economic history of the New Territories since 1900? To this question Potter does not fully address himself, and he allows his section on the Cooperative to belie the implication of his title.
In spite of the change of title, the argument of the book on the subject of the Treaty Ports is a considerable modification of the argument as presented in the thesis. This is all to the good; the micro-economist takes on the macro-economists at his peril.