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A painting of a gentry scholar with two courtesans, by Tang Yin, c. 1500. The four occupations (simplified Chinese: 士农工商; traditional Chinese: 士農工商; pinyin: Shì nóng gōng shāng), or "four categories of the people" (Chinese: 四民; pinyin: sì mín), [1] [2] was an occupation classification used in ancient China by either Confucian or Legalist scholars as far back as the ...
Confucian or Legalist scholars in ancient China—perhaps as far back as the late Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BC)—categorized all socioeconomic groups into four broad and hierarchical occupations (in descending order): the shi (scholars, or gentry), the nong (peasant farmers), the gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the shang (merchants). [1]
The four occupations were the shì (士) the class of "knightly" scholars, mostly from lower aristocratic orders, the gōng (工) who were the artisans and craftsmen of the kingdom and who, like the farmers, produced essential goods needed by themselves and the rest of society, the nóng (農) who were the peasant farmers who cultivated the land which provided the essential food for the people ...
China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China (Hong Kong UP, 2006), covers 1500 to 1999; 136pp; Faure, David. The rural economy of pre-liberation China: trade expansion and peasant livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937 (Oxford UP, 1989). Guo, Yongqin, et al.
The Chinese National Peasants' Association (Chinese: 中华全国农民协会; pinyin: Zhōnghuá quánguó nóngmín xiéhuì), otherwise known as the Chinese Peasants' Association (Chinese: 中国农民协会; pinyin: Zhōngguó nóngmín xiéhuì), was a peasant organization created in 1927 with the specific aim of transforming the peasantry via Socialism.
Peasants often abandoned farming to produce steel or work in other industrial production. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the Three Years of Natural Disasters (although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food.
For millennia, agriculture has played an important role in the Chinese economy and society. By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields.
By the Han dynasty, the well-field system of land distribution had fallen out of use in China though reformers like Wang Mang tried to restore it. The equal-field system was introduced into practice around 485 AD by the Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei under the support of Empress Dowager Feng during the Northern and Southern dynasties period.