Farmers' Petition And Government Response

With the deepening of reform and opening up, especially the continuous adjustment of the ownership structure and the relations of production, social group differentiation become more and more obvious. Significant changes occur in social stratification, which shows the process of the diversity and complexity of the social interests, forming new conflicts of different interests groups. In recent years, considerable proportions of group events have the nature of the petition in our country according to incomplete statistics. Under the effect of inner driving force of different interest groups and the situation of few ordered expression channel formed for different interest group, group events are inevitable, and will be increased. Therefore, how to effectively resolve group events to prevent the occurrence of unexpected events have become a task which brooks no delay. What is the social background, causes and nature of the farmers petition? What is the direction and the correct response to it by the government should be? In recent years, for these problems, despite the academic and government departments have a lot of studies and reports, the book and article from the anthropological point of view is still quite lacking.This paper chose the central region of the Y City as the research area. Y City is a city of heavy industry with less than four million people in the central region of China. Rural population accounts for nearly30percent, a city with relatively small part of rural people. With the reform opening up, although the Y City has made tremendous economic and social development achievements, in economic restructuring and social transformation process, some of the reform package of measures can not keep up. The city accumulated a lot of social conflicts and problems, making frequent occurrence of various types of petitions. In recent years, the rural population has been petitioning groups account for a large quantity of reason in petition process. With the current urbanization and rapid economic development, land losses, housing demolition, transformation of villages have great relationship with the petitions. Moreover, it coupled with widespread rural village cadres’corruption and manipulation of village elections and other issues in recent years. These reasons make the rural population become an increasingly prominent petition phenomenon.This paper analyzes the problem of farmers petition on the perspective of the anthropology and sociology. Anthropology emphasizes the description on the process of human behavior, action and habit. The paper conducts a descriptive analysis on the petitioners’course of action, mental state and the conduct government administrative departments, and using the "detailed description and brief analysis" of the research strategy and narrative, showcase the phenomenon of farmers petition. The paper adopts the Social Conflict Theory, Theory of Collective Action and Game Theory to analyze of the petition causes combining with the fieldwork of Y City in governance petition issues. After the long-term participant observation, the author witnessed countless individuals or groups to petition with a variety of reasons in the research process. As the scattered object of study, the individuals or groups of petitioners is distribution of in the Y city. The author took the scene of petition as central observing the behavior of groups of petitioners, analyzing the petition of some typical cases and interviewing a number of petitioners. With the background of local situation and the current phenomenon of frequently occurred petitions, the paper studies the petition phenomenon as a whole by the means of combination of macroscopic and microcosmic.At present, farmer petition frequent occurrence is an obvious expression of increasingly social separation and social stability. The process of farmer petition is the process of confliction and transaction. Conflict Theory considers that social conflict is everywhere, but it can ease the social contradiction and intension, which is good for social integration. Game Theory focuses on the process of the production and maintenance of the society from people’s various decision, the theory deem that people who are rational and strategic are always calculate and optimize their interests, then make decision from their actions. In the procession of petition and transaction, petitioners and the basic level governments formed the following three relations:cooperation games, noncooperative games and repeatability games.The paper narrates and analyses the reason, psychology and way of action of farmer petition from the substantial cases. First, the paper put emphasis on the conflict and transaction relationship between farmers and basic level governments, on the bases of which point out the frequent farmer petitions are reflection of long-term accumulation of social contradiction and different interests groups become antagonizing from group differences. Second, the paper discusses and analyzes the action way of the basic level governments coping with the farmer petition, deeming that for the misunderstandings of farmer petition and contorted notion of administrative of the basic level governments which only take care of their own achievements, using "non-problem"strategy to deal with the aspirations of the farmers’petition, which aggravate the contradictions of petitions. Third, large quantities of repeatability games petitions intensify the differentiation and conflicts of village social interests, which lead to the increasing distrust between farmers and basic level government. Based on the limited and expression space and poor channel of farmer’s interests status, and on the basis of experience summarize and theory analysis, this paper gives a series of purposeful countermeasure and suggestions on the structure of an orderly expression system and how to interact and rebuild the relationship between petition farmers and basic level government well.