Deconstructing The Country:the Disembedding,Transcending And Renaissance Of Community

The rural transition is associated with the modernization process, while now after reaching the inflection point of urbanization, it turns out to be controversial for scholars and policy makers the direction and prospects of rural area in the future. To figure out this question, it is necessary to thoroughly examine the dynamics of rural changes. Focus on the communitys of Dragon Town in Southern Shandong province since the early20th Century, this study tried to characterize the process and draw out the dynamics of rural changes.It suggested that the fundamental driving force of rural change is modernity, which embodied in modern state regime, market economic system and time-space distanciation mechanism. However, each of these three mechanisms interacted with each other and dominated the rural transition in different periods. Modernity exert the two-way influence of deconstruction and reflexivity.Before the Reform and Opening-up, the modern state regime played a leading role, promoting the formation of the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy through the implementation of planned economy and disciplining the labor force from family and their own land through the compulsory division of labor. However, market was suppressed in this period and the three main factors of labor, land and currency were not marketization. Therefore, the rural community underdone a mandatory disembedding process which dominated by the government.Since the Reform and Opening-up, the market economic system was gradually established. The "making profit" principle of market economy penetrating everywhere of rural life while the rural community turned out to be disembedded roundly. Firstly, the outstretched market system made the privoius economic community dispersing. Secondly, the privous social ties became fragmenting which simultaneously immersed in the market economy principle. Thirdly, the grass-root power system was disconnected while the local governance was economization. Fourthly, the religional belief was gradually secularized, consumer culture became mianstream and economic rationalization dominated the culture activities in villages.Entering the new century, the time-space distanciation mechanism of modernity played the dominating role. On one hand, the rural community was further open, villages differentiats more deeply and village community was disembedding in time-space. On the other hand, the reflexivity of modernity is reengineering the country simultaneously with the integration of country and the city in larger area. The country was landscaped, at the same time, the locality and values were recognized by local people, more and more elites come back to their hometown to participate in the new rural construction. Public consciousness of rural residents is awakening and their public needs are converging which contribute the village to become modern rural community. All of these made the rural area realize its renaissance as an eco-social system with values.This study construct a new theortical framework to analyze the rural transition in China. Different from the voices of "the village’end" and the village conservation advocates, it showed an alternative prospect of rural development. It’s believed that considerable amount of villages will not end in the future, or remain static, but evolved with the integration of urban and rural, and the mutual constitutive of globalization and locality, fulfilling its own values and functions.