Reflection on the Process of Liberation of Serfs and their Arising Consciousness of Contract

Abstract

The purpose of this article lies in discerning the relations of landownership in the period, "Sung" (_??_), i. e. the post-10 century in China. This author, being different from the point of view of Professor Miyazaki and others, should like to emphasize that China in the post-10 century had already institutionalized a serfdom society and the serfs, what we call, " tien-hu " (_??__??_) had been under the extraeconomic compulsive power. Needless to say, the socio-economic conditions, within which they were obliged to be put, had not been altogether similar, due to time and place. We might observe many facts that there were some regions, where the serfs were bound to their land and had no freedom to move about. And also in other regions, plenty of labor-power, the serfs, who had no such compulsion, instead, suffered from the conflicts among them. Moreover, the very conflicts were often caused by the seizure of lands among the lords and made the circumstances of serfs even worse than could be otherwise.
In the advanced regions, however, the serfs could liberate themselves just around before and after the 17 century (I call it the first stage of serf-liberation of serfdom). Then we should recognize there the ascendancy of contract-consciousness, which could not exist in the previous period.
The overall, final and decisive liberation of serfdom, of course, was not yet attained until the arrival of the Chinese revolutionary period in the 20th century.