Following his mentor’s approach, the author employs Marx’s category of the “economic formation of society” to examine the so-called “five social formations” and thereby clarify the underlying logic of Chinese historical development. He develops Zhao’s lines of inquiry into the transformation of ancient human society, the evolution of property relations, the movement from communal ownership to private ownership and from private ownership toward a higher form of common ownership, and the progressive deepening of private property. Methodologically, the work addresses the problems of “substituting theory for history,” “deriving theory from history,” and the “integration of history and theory” in the study of the history of the Chinese land system.

This volume identifies a theoretical thread that, the author argues, had long escaped sufficient notice but runs throughout Marx’s work on Capital: the “economic formation of society.” It develops its argument through a systematic integration of history and theory.

Three Contributions to the Study of the Chinese Land System

• At the level of historical materials, it rejects the traditional account of the “well-field system.”
• At the theoretical level, it restores the so-called “Asiatic mode of production” to Marx’s original discussion of the “Asiatic” “mode of production” within the category of the “economic formation of society.”
• At the level of historical interpretation, it breaks with the “Soviet-Marxist” model of the so-called “five ‘social formations.’