Discussions On The Crisis Of Rural Areas Of The North Of China During The Period From The 1920s To The 1930s

In the modern times with the aggression of the west, some elements of modernization began to be injected into China. However, the progressing of modernization led by industrialization broke the fundamental development models of cities and rural areas as a unity. Accompanied with the significant advancement of urbanization were the serious lagging of the rural areas and their separation with cities. In the early period of the twentieth century, some cities of our country started their journey towards modernization. In contrast, the vast rural areas of China, as the objects of exploitation, came to become the places of goods dumping and raw materials supplying. With the division of cities from rural areas, the former obtained a malformed development, while the latter were thrown into an irreconcilable depression, which is called 'the crisis of rural areas'. It is the crisis of existence and development taken place in the rural areas when China was invaded by foreign countries and forced onto a road to modernization.With the North of China being an important region, the condition of its rural areas was fairly typical of the whole north. This thesis, taking the north rural areas as the study object, investigates the general condition of the rural crisis in the 1920s to 1930s. First of all, the thesis makes a brief description of the land distributions in these four northern provinces and finds out that most of the peasants there possessed their own lands and therefore most of them were land-owing planters. However due to an imbalance in the land distribution, most of them were poor. Then, the thesis makes some discussions on the representation and influence of the crisis, which are involved with both the general situation throughout China and the local features of the rural areas in the North of China. On the whole, rural areas being trapped in depression and peasants in poverty are the common problems with these areas during the period from the 1920s to the 1930s. Finally the reasons for the crisis are explored. It is concluded that the peasants' heavy burdens are the major reasons, China being a semicolonial and semi-feudal society is the deep one and the aggression of capitalist economy is external one, besides the irregular disturbances from warlords' fighting and frequent scourges worsen the crisis.In a word, the crisis of the rural areas in the period from the 1920s to 1930s broke out in the initial stage of Chinese modernization. It contained the intrinsic defects common in the social structures of traditional rural areas on the one hand, and demonstrated obviously the troubles arising in the transformation and reconstruction of Chinese modern society on the other. In a sense, it limited the historical process of urbanization and industrialization.