By the late 1920s, the period which most resembles the period of this book, China was torn by civil strife from Canton to Peking, from the India border to the Amur River on the border of Russia. The lot of the Chinese peasant was not very good. Most of them were tenant farmers, working the land for the rich landowners, who may have owned thousands of acres (as does Wang Lung at the end of The Good Earth). But here and there were small, independent farmers working their own plots, as does Wang Lung at the beginning of the novel. These small farmers were constantly at the prey of marauding bandits — such as Wang Lung's uncle and the "red beards." They were also at the mercy of the grain merchants since they could not read or write; hence, the importance for Wang Lung to have his oldest son learn to read and write. Essentially, however, most of the farmers were left alone, for even the war lords had to eat. The farmer was thus protected to some extent by the same needs which plagued him and his family.
In times of favorable weather, the peasant lived a frugal but adequate life. He saw very little of actual money (during the first part of the novel, a piece of silver was a very rare thing for Wang Lung), but he usually had enough to eat, though it might be no more than garlic and unleavened bread. Wang Lung was often scorned by those who had education or an ability for commerce, and people often called him "Wang, the farmer" in a derogatory manner and held their nose in contempt for the garlic he ate. But in spite of these things, the small landowning peasant had a pride in the land he owned, and this pride is Wang Lung's most distinguishing characteristic. His final speech in the novel concerns the importance of retaining his land and never selling even a small portion of it.
Some critics have claimed that Pearl Buck is not writing about a Chinese farmer, but a universal farmer, one who knows that his riches and his security come from the good earth itself. This concept does give a universality to the novel, but for most readers the importance of the novel lies in Pearl Buck's knowledge of China and of the Chinese — a knowledge as great as that which any foreigner can possess. Her life in the rural areas of China also gave her a profound insight into the thinking of the Chinese peasant, something that Mao Tse-tung discovered when he was planning his revolution, and the Communist leader eventually came to depend on farmers like Wang Lung, with their strength of character, as a nucleus of his revolutionaries. Even Wang Lung's third son, we hear, became an important official in the revolutionary army.
