Abstract:
“Cropland trap” was one of the leading reasons for broad peasants in traditional agricultural society in China to desert their homeland and even to abandon farming for business. And the rise of “cropland trap” was directly related with frequent natural disasters, defects in the system of quotaed land tax and lack of a system of coping with calamity. Natural disasters meant enormous risk in face of traditional agricultural production; the system of quotaed land tax failed to take into account possible risk factors; finally, when a calamity came, the feudal government did not take effective measures against it but made every attempt to preserve the system to shift off calamity risk and losses. All this could but force the peasants to desert homeland and not to like to continue to farm the land. As a result, “cropland trap” became worse and worse, neither effects nor consequences of which allows underestimation.
