The Eastern Jin inherited the Western Jin's land and taxation systems, implementing both the occupancy field system and the taxable field system. A male was counted as an adult upon reaching seventeen and began bearing government corvée and taxes. An adult male occupied seventy mu of land; these seventy mu were private fields, on which he needed only to pay a portion in rent and taxes to the government. There were also fifty mu of taxable fields. These were official fields, and everything harvested from them was to be handed over to the government, effectively constituting service to the authorities. Naturally, in practice, it was impossible to inspect exactly how much someone harvested from his taxable fields, so a uniform tax rate per mu was prescribed instead. This created a problem: land varied in fertility, and years brought both bumper harvests and poor ones. In years of famine or disaster, if the government offered no reductions or exemptions, owner-farmers would go bankrupt because they could not pay their taxes. Many consequently left their native places, abandoned their household registrations, and entered the great estates of the gentry clans to farm for gentry landlords as hired laborers, becoming hidden households that evaded corvée and taxes. Some owner-farmers had not occupied the full seventy mu of private fields but still had to pay the same amount in taxes. Taxation assessed by land had become a disguised poll tax. This further hastened the bankruptcy of owner-farmers, and ever more hidden households flowed into the gentry estates, leaving the state without men to perform its services and draining away its tax revenue-
After hearing the He Clan's Dianji describe how the Qiantang Chen Clan had expanded its holdings and absorbed farming households, Lu Shu said, "Taxable fields are official fields. How can the Chen