It is one of the tragic coincidences of history that the Europeans should have appeared in China at a time when the Chinese were entering upon one of their most acute periods of agrarian decline and class exploitation. Roughly, from the middle of the eighteenth century down to the present day the lot of the Chinese farmers has become worse and worse. At periods the country as a whole seemed fairly prosperous, but the broad agricultural recession remained constant. The nineteenth century was one long record of rebellions, and the twentieth amplified the disturbances. Government in modern China has fallen heir to a depression centuries old, arising from inequitable land distribution, overtaxation, insufficient public works for drainage and communications, and--in more recent generations--the evils attendant upon sharp economic change. Most economic writers agree that some of the difficulties of Chinese agriculture are caused by the smallness of individual holdings and by population pressure. Such factors are not subject to immediate remedy; the peasants have attributed their misfortune primarily to landlordism and political oppression. The Chinese Communists, on their economic front, may perform a valuable service if they are able to devise new methods of social organization which will provide relief for the organic difficulties of Chinese agriculture. Of all the important problems of China, the land problem shows government ineffectiveness at its worst. Behind the T'ai-p'ing rebellion which flared up in unparalleled fanaticism in the 1850's and 1860's, there was the long provocation of a land system which made farming unprofitable and a government supine in the face of unreversed decline. The Boxer rebellion burst forth from the unrest of the peasants, although it could be deflected by the demagoguery of the Manchu officials and changed into wild xenophobia. When the fiercely discordant economics of imperialism and international industrialism intruded upon the old and already corrupted economy, farm existence became even less tolerable than it might have been if left to its native miseries. Dynastic decomposition was hastened by the collapse of handicraft economy and the fiscal disorganization caused by Western commercial activity.