420 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Social Statistics Section
The Economics of Landownership, Land Tenure, Population Processes, and the Rate of Rent in 1930s Rural China
Matthew R. Marler, PhD
Linda Gail Arrigo, PhD
Several large-scale surveys of rural China were conducted in the decade prior to the invasion of China by Japan in 1937. These surveys have led to many controversies over the degree of inequality prior to the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution, and whether demographic processes in effect alleviate inequality in peasant society (i.e. the Lenin versus Chayanov debate). With computational and simulation tools available from the 1980s on, Arrigo evaluated these surveys and sought to simulate the economic and demographic processes that might match the empirical Chinese data, completing a compendious Ph.D. thesis (Arrigo, 1996) and comparing also surveys of prerevolutionary Russia and contemporary Bangladesh. Marler has taken on a planned series of extensions of Arrigo's work to achieve greater precision, using more modern computing power and more generalized theory. Here we focus on a simulation of Population Processes Generating the Landownership Distribution, in particular the random elements of partition in inheritance.