The Evaluation Of Living Conditions Of The Peasants In The Suburb Of Shanghai In The First Half Of The 20～(th) Century

The living conditions of the peasants have been an important sphere for the study of the history of peasants. The academic circles have been interested in the living conditions of the peasants in the early 20th century. Some scholars found the evidences for the growth of the modern economy, while some saw the poverty and crisis. Even in the study of the suburban economic history of Shanghai, there are also disputes as to the development and the stagnancy of the economic conditions. This article is based on the formal instigations and documentary records of the early 20th century, and makes an evaluation of the living conditions of the peasants in the suburbs of Shanghai.The article is composed of five parts.The preface talks about the meanings to write this articles, the research methodology and makes a brief explanation for those relevant statistics.The first chapter examines the life of the peasants from the view of their daily work and daily life. The daily work includes the farming and a part-time job. In farming, the straitness of the arable land is a hindrance to the development of the agricultural technology and management. Few of the peasants adopted the new agricultural appliances, fertilizer and pesticide and the agricultural output remained at the level of the Ming and Qing periods, not gaining remarkable progress. The part-time job flourished in this period. There were more and more peasants who had a part-time job from textile factories in the early period to other industrial and service fields, and the peasants engaged became more and more professional. The daily life includes the eating and living conditions and the recreational activities. The daily eating was rather coarse and the varieties were limited without any changes compared with that before. The clothing remained the traditional home-made, however since the dumpling of the foreign clothing, more and more peasants began to adopt the foreign one and the expenditure went up accordingly. The narrowness of the inhabitancy made the life much more abominable.