Study Of Social Capital And Political Development Of The Period Of Social Transformation

Since the 1990s, social capital and its applications have gradually become focuses questions and frontier issues on common concern such as sociology, economics, politics and so on. Social capital is not only an interdisciplinary concept widely used by various subjects but also an up-to-date paradigm to explain social development taken by scholars all over the world. But when scholars apply it to China Studies, they have similar problems as follows. Owing to their inconsistent concept definitions on social capital, the different applied analytical frameworks, the unclear cognition of its internal operation mechanism and the ambiguous understanding of theoretical preconditions, their researches on Chinese social capital of different periods are insufficiently thorough and also their understandings on China's social capital during the social transition period are inadequately comprehensive. Through the study I found that, scholars were limited to solve a certain problem such as democratic development, civic society construction and political stability when they used social capital to explain Chinese political problems. There is no paper yet take the overall situation on the relations between social capital and political development into consideration. This paper tries to fill the blank by discussion.Based on systematic illustration of social capital theory, the paper probes into social capital formations from three stages and separately analyzes the relations between social capital and political development. After highlighting relation development on social capital and political development during the social transition period,I put forward path selection on modern social capital construction in hope that with both the leading role of government and the supplementary role of urban and rural community, social capital construction will be promoted to have positive effects on contemporary political development.