How the Law May Create Poverty: The Rent Prepayment Custom in Modern North China and Its Social Consequences

Abstract

The custom of prepaying land rent, a widespread practice in North China stretching from the Ming dynasty to the Republic, has not been fully discussed in the scholarship. This article addresses two issues surrounding this custom from the perspectives of legal history and the social and economic history of North China. The first issue is the custom itself. The article explores how the Guomindang government institutionalized and legitimized the custom at the normative and empirical levels through the Civil Code of the Republic of China and other laws. The second issue is the institutional consequences. Through historical analysis, this article points out that the rent prepayment custom brought about fluctuations in the grain market in rural North China, plunging peasants into a situation of selling grain at low prices in order to prepay the land rent, which in turn led them into a cycle of poverty.