were the "clan estates" _(i-chuang)_, created by Fan Chung-yen
(989-1052) in 1048. The income of these clan estates were used for the
benefit of the whole clan, were controlled by clan-appointed managers
and had tax-free status, guaranteed by the government which regarded
them as welfare institutions. Technically, they might better be called
corporations because they were similar in structure to some of our
industrial corporations. Under the Chinese economic system, large-scale
landowning always proved socially and politically injurious. Up to very
recent times the peasant who rented his land paid 40-50 per cent of the
produce to the landowner, who was responsible for payment of the normal
land tax. The landlord, however, had always found means of evading
payment. As each district had to yield a definite amount of taxation,
the more the big landowners succeeded in evading payment the more had to
be paid by the independent small farmers. These independent peasants
could then either "give" their land to the big landowner and pay rent to
him, thus escaping from the attentions of the tax-officer, or simply
leave the district and secretly enter another one where they were not
registered. In either case the government lost taxes.

Large-scale landowning proved especially injurious in the Sung period,
for two reasons. To begin with, the official salaries, which had always
been small in China, were now totally inadequate, and so the officials
were given a fixed quantity of land, the yield of which was regarded as
an addition to salary. This land was free from part of the taxes. Before
long the officials had secured the liberation of the whole of their land
from the chief taxes. In the second place, the taxation system was
simplified by making the amount of tax proportional to the amount of
land owned. The lowest bracket, however, in this new system of taxation
comprised more land than a poor peasant would actually own, and this was
a heavy blow to the small peasant-owners, who in the past had paid a