The next seminar of the 10th Year Greater China Legal History Seminar Series organised by CUHK Faculty of Law titled “How to Own a Forest: Shareholding, Futures Contracts, and Ancestral Trusts in Southern China” will be delivered by Professor Ian M. Miller, St. John's University, on 22 November 2024.
About the seminar:
Can you own a forest? To a modern audience, this question may appear absurdly naive, but to villagers in Ming and Qing China, it was a surprisingly fraught question. First, labor was a key way to demonstrate possession, but forestry labor was far less regular than farm labor. By plowing, weeding, and reaping farmland, peasants regularly demonstrated their claims to ownership, or at least possession. But forests were planted in the space of a few years and then left to mature for several decades. How could peasants demonstrate ownership of trees that they were not managing on a day-to-day basis? Second, inheritance was a key basis for ownership claims, but ancestral forests had taboos on their use. Trees near graves, temples, wells, watercourses, and other ritually significant sites were off-limits. How could descendants claim ancestral forests without limiting their own abilities to use them productively?
To answer these questions villagers in southern China developed contractual mechanisms to both subdivide and merge forest rights and responsibilities. These included shares and other clauses used to partition forest rights and responsibilities, as well as trusts, portfolio deeds, and management contracts to combine properties for easier investment and oversight. In this talk, I will discuss the key role that forests played in the emergence of several financial instruments, including shares, futures contracts, and trusts, and the implications this has for our understanding of land ownership itself.
Click here for details and registration.