[The Good Earth illuminates the death of Confucian China.] Pearl Buck defends [the premise that China's vitality would continue to flow upward from the land]…. As the title of Mrs. Buck's novel suggests, land was the basic social and economic value in Wang's life. (pp. 3-4)

In the early part of the novel at least, Wang is the epitome of farmer virtue…. Yet it is impossible for his family really to prosper. (p. 4)

In the south where he flees [a famine,] it is the great commercial activity of the city, encouraged by the West, which is able to provide work for uprooted and miserable agricultural laborers such as himself. True, such an existence was marginal, and Wang Lung and his family would certainly have died slowly on the fringes of the urban mass, still unable to break out of their poverty, had it not been for an exterior gratuitous event. The raid which the starving poor make on a great palace gives Wang Lung some capital. This enables him to begin the long climb out of the abject misery that had oppressed his family for generations. Revolutionary violence was able to accomplish what Confucian virtue had not been able to do.

In keeping with the Confucian ideal—and like farmers in most areas of the world—Wang buys land with his new wealth; otherwise, he seems to have little social ambition…. [The] lives of his three sons reflect the decay of much of the traditional ethic of Confucian society and the rise of certain new social values.

Moreover, certain of the social changes mirrored in The Good Earth now seem to be occurring outside of the traditional Confucian institutions, suggesting that a radical modification of the entire social structure has begun. (pp. 4-5)

Although the social unrest of the city was to a certain extent an element of the old Chinese social cycle, it was intensified by the breakdown of central government control and by increasing pressure on the land. Moreover, certain new elements, new ideologies brought in by the West, were further altering the traditional situation. These forces are symbolized by the missionaries and the student political agitators, usually Communists, whom Wang Lung sees in the city. (pp. 5-6)

For Wang Lung, a farmer who saw life from a completely different, Confucian viewpoint, happiness could not be defined in terms of social change. To be himself and to find his meaning in life, he had to return to his land, his good earth. He remained basically unmarked by the interlude in the south and blissfully unaware that what was happening in the city was altering—both subtly and violently—the face of the old China he knew. (p. 6)