The Distribution of Land Rights in Huaibei from the Republican Period to the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China: A Case Study Based on the Suixi County Archives

Abstract

It was once believed that land rights in the Huaibei region were highly concentrated and that large ownership of land was extremely common. However, in recent years, more and more scholars have come to believe that there was no such tendency of serious land concentration in modern China. Republican-era statistics on land ownership in Huaibei are extremely rare. In contrast, the “Land and Real Estate Ownership Certificate Stubs” 土地房产所有证存根 collected by the Suixi County Archives in the early years of the People’s Republic provide detailed records on the land ownership distribution in this county. Using these materials, we calculate the Gini coefficient of land ownership distribution for each village. It turns out that most of the villages had a Gini coefficient lower than 0.35, which indicates only a moderate differentiation of land occupation. It shows that large landownership did not prevail in rural Suixi. Rather, it was a world of small-scale landowners.