““But even peasants within agrarian states were likely to take more interest in raising productivity when they had secure access to land and were not taxed too heavily. The surprisingly high yields of peasant farming in China in the centuries before the modern era almost certainly had something to do with the fact that tax levels were usually modest (because Chinese governments did not usually spend as much on warfare as did contemporary European states) and that the proportion of peasants who owned their land was high.””
![“The society was so different [in China] - it was a feudalistic society. It didn't come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.” quote by Ai Weiwei](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/644/ai-weiwei-824_china_the-society-was-so-different-in-china-it_2965691.jpg)
