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Study On Inherent Rural Land Transfer Of Peasant On Hilly Area In Sichuan Province

Posted on:2017-01-31Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:T ZhouFull Text:PDF
GTID:1109330509954501Subject:Land Resource Science
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The successful practice of household contract system was of historical milestone significance to Chinese reform and opening-up policy, especially to emancipating rural productivity. However, with the rapid development of social economy, when household management of production is changing the ―three agriculture issues‖ to some extent, it also shows some disadvantages; peasant household atomization, land fragmentation and peasant‘s management on small scale are contradictory to the objective demands of current modern agricultural intensification and scale development. Industrialization and urbanization accelerated rural population mobility and uncultivated and derelict land keep appearing in rural areas, while rural land transfer is an important way to solve uncultivated farmland and realize land optimal configuration. Currently, family is the basic unit in rural areas. When allocating land resources, traditional blood relationship and geographical relationship are the bond. Reciprocal rural household endogenous farmland transfer is happening inside villages and among peasants spontaneously. Due to the institutional and industrial development path, local governments have preferred to agricultural enterprise, and promote large-scale transfer of agricultural land. However, significant regional differences in China’s rural cause that large-scale transfer had not have a wide range of adaptability, especially in the western hilly areas,where are underdeveloped, undulating terrain, land fragmentation, lacking of system and supervision, and are thus not suitable for large-scale mechanized operations. The academic focusing of attention and practice development are urgently needed to explore local conditions and protection of the interests of farmer‘s agricultural land transfer mode. Therefore, the government would not take action on rural farmland transfer practices in 2014 and 2015 in succession and there would be no a sweeping approach, no compelling orders and no administrative confused orders. Thus some problems should be especially prevented. For example, some industrial and commercial capital could be intervened in farmland transfer and then conducted non-farming construction and influenced farmland protection and grain safety. Therefore, under the current policy background and objective practices, from the perspective of farmers‘ profit, it was of important theoretical values and practical significance to combine systemic elements of fair stability, analyze peasants of different gifts adjust measures to local conditions and allocate family land resources and family labor force, understand the impassable property of rural household inherent transfer which hold dominant status in the nation, i.e., the reality of existence, regional rationality and positive benefit values, carry out rural land reform stably and realize ―synchronization of four modernizations‖ in western underdeveloped hilly areas.Therefore, this study on the basis of organizing literatures aapplied the concept of inherent transfer and tooke Sichuan typical hilly area Yibin as research object. I selected 10 counties and 30 administrative villages in Yibin, altogether 2400 households. In the meantime, I conducted a 5-year individual case long-term follow-up survey in Jinhuang Team, Shangba Village, Yibin County in 2011-2015. Furthermore, I carried out typical case surveies on 11 agricultural enterprises and appliessocialized small peasant theoretical framework and strong and weak relationship theory and adoptslogistic model and artificial social model for analysis and simulation on rural household inherent transfer in theresearch area. In ding so, the following results were obtained:(1)Household inherent transfer still took the dominant role in research areas and its evolution track was ―rural population mobility—rural household hierarchy polarization—land dependence dissimilation—spontaneous transfer formation‖, possessing social functions of guaranteeing livelihood of rural households and maintaining stability of social structure. Farmland transfer in the research area took endogenous-type transfer as the subject. The statistical caliber subcontract area proportion increased to 60.02% in 2014 from 56.10% in 2009. The average ratio was 59.80% and the farming replacement in the sample survey was 56.91% in 2015. This kind of endogenous-type transfer appeared due to the circulation of various factors of production in the countryside which had led to the rural social stratum differentiation and formed the non-agricultural rural-household class, concurrent occupation Rural-household class and agricultural rural-household class. All classes‘ understandings of land and agricultural benefits had been also differentiated and the demand for agricultural livelihoods and land dependence manifested as: agricultural household > concurrent occupation household >non-agricultural household. Therefore, the household differentiation led to differentiation of all classes attitudes towards farmland. On the other hand, based on the realistic national conditions in China, the rural labor migration presented obvious life cycle changes. Therefore, the households‘ demands for land were also changed with the family life cycles and then the intergenerational family division of labor was formed with ―farther farming and son working‖. The resultant force of these two results formed the inherent-type transfer, which showed characteristics such as transfer disintermediation, rent materialization and agreement informality and shaped the middle household. Under the theoretical framework of socialized small household, it was found that inherent-type transfer relied on friends and relatives and village ethics.As a result, the maintainence of the inherent-type transfer order can solve not only problems of migrant workers‘ retreats but also the livelihoods and limited development issues of groups who could only depend on the agricultural incomes due to their own reasons. The reciprocal benefit and mutual assistance mechanism were thus formed. The middle household‘ intermediate value could be further maintained rural social stability and development.(2)The periphery influence factors of household inherent transfer came from local governments‘ offside behaviors and village committees‘ excessive intervention in rural land transfer, which caused extrusion in household inherent transfer, remodeled rural social structure and endangered the benefits of most households with combined occupations and pure rural households.The game theory was used to analyze and integrate the transfer motivations of the local governments and the village committees, and the results showed that the local governments had taken offside actions dually driven by financial logic and target-oriented responsibility system. At the same time, driven by economic interests and the objective assessment, the village committees had presented role dislocation in the farmland transfer and been altered into agents for local governments and enterprises from bidirectional agents. On the other hand, the pursuit of self-interest had promoted the village committees to be independent interest subjects to intervene in farmland transfer. The local governments and the village committees excessively intervened in farmland transfer and even powerfully propelled the large-scale farmland transfer through administrative means, which had made the left-behind peasants be transferred and forced the labor to be commercialized. However, the quality problems of this part of labor forces had made numerous old people and women unemployed and stayed at countryside areas. According to the survey in the Yibin County, 66.67% of peasants lost their jobs and had to stay at home after transfer and the female unemployment rate was up to 48.27%. This has directly led to the disconnection of peasants and land revenues, automatically disintegrated the middle class and resulted in peasants‘ half-proletarianization. However, after comparing the overall productivities of agricultural management main bodies formed due to the endogenous-type transfer and the large-scale farmland transfer implemented forcibly by the local government, the generated results showed that small households(3.44) >middle households(2.59) > family farms(1.51) > small-scale agricultural enterprises(1.12) > large-scale agricultural enterprises(0.94). It had indicated that the larger the scale was, the lower the overall production efficiency would be. The main reason was that the business entities formed by the large-scale transfer was depended on the mode of production employee escrow and it was difficult for them to bypass various natural barriers of biological characteristics of agricultural production. In addition, the supervision and ―moral hazard‖ dilemmas had created great management costs for agricultural enterprises, which had made the overall production efficiency of this sort of management subject declined as the scale grew. As a result, many companies began to transform and plant commercial crops, which formed the ―grain-removal‖ action. Therefore, in the current social economic environment, external factors like the local governments and village committees‘ cognitive deviations and premature advance behaviors in the farmland transfer have made an impact on the endogenous-type transfer, reshaped the rural social structure and encroached on interests of the vast majority of households with combined occupations and pure peasants.(3)Inner margin factors of household inherent transfer were changes of rural family structure and the strong-weak relationship among rural households.The endogenous impact factors leading to endogenous-type transfer were further analyzed to lay the foundation for abstract behavior rules of artificial society model. Using the logistic model and strong-weak relationship theory to analyze factors affecting the peasants‘ willingness of transfer in the research area, results indicated: 1. professional was significant positive correlation to the transfer intention. The occupation is significantly positively correlated to outward transferring willingness and significantly negatively correlated to inward transferring willingness. Gross population of a family affected outward transferring willingness but had no significant correlation with inward transferring willingness. In the labor force structure, a family‘s agricultural labor force is significantly negatively correlated to outward transferring willingness and significantly positively correlated to inward transferring willingness. The higher a family‘s economic income and the per capita income were, the more they had outwarded the transferring willingness. Conversely, they had more inward transferring willingness.The per capita cultivated area was only positively correlated to outward transferring willingness and the location is positively correlated to outward transferring willingness and negatively correlated to inward transferring willingness at 0.05 level, which had reflected that endogenous factors such as a peasant‘s family structure are major impetuses for the formation of peasant transferring willingness. 2. Due to not sound rural transfer markets, the social relation was an important decision basis when a peasant made a decision of transfer. For example, he would select the transfer object and form according to the social relations. The power of strong relationship promoted to form inherent-type transfer between peasants, conforming to homogeneous characteristics of rural left-behind labor forces, such as less social resources, low social status and low breadth of social ties. Inherent-type transfer was a sub-optimal choice when an outward transferring peasant could not realize achieve two kinds of instrumental purposes, economic and social securities synchronously; rural capital forms strong-weak relation chains using the bridge role of weak ties and reduces transaction costs of land transfer. Then the scale transfer was formed. However, the vast majority of peasants still belonged to the group with the lack of social resources. Inherent-type transfer could thus be a powerful complement to the imperfect transfer market allocation and the government and rural capital with abundant social resources were able to likely to pursue private interests in transfer and consider behaviors of damaging peasants‘ interests.(4)Farmland transfer artificial society model simulated household inherent transfer from the bottom-up emerging behaviors. By verifying that the simulated result coincided with empirical data, it indicated that the model could simulate and reflect the evolution rules of inherent transfer effectively. According to the basic data of 230 people from 62 households in Jinhuang Group, Shangba Village, based on the MAIA meta-model, the behavior rules of transfer formed by households differentiation were abstracted, including family population and the labor reproduction behavior, family labor allocation behavior, family currency income and expenditure behaviors and transfer behavior rules. It simulated the future household endogenous-type transfer behaviors from 2011 to 2030 and the results showed that the rural population was on the rise as a whole, but the agricultural labor force presented the life cycle changes; peasant workers averaged 35.44 years of age and the education duration was 8.07 years; farming peasants have an average age of 56.8 with the education duration of 5.24 years.The change rule of households‘ labor presented intergenerational replacement; the transfer proportion also changed with the labor cycle. The proportion reached 41.22% in 2011 and will be up to 52.34% in 2020. With the labor forces returning home, the proportion could go down to30.71% in 2030. The land area per household of inward transferring household is 0.7337 hectares and the largest land area per household kept in 1.4575 hectares during the simulation, which complied with the conditions of the middle peasants and also confirmed that the inherent-type transfer was conducive to the formation of the middle peasant class. Citizenization rate can radically reduce the rural population. Under the two hypothetical citizenization rates, 3% and 56%, the proportions of abandoned land presented two distinct developing tendencies. Under the level 3%, the proportion of abandoned land decreases from 30.17% in 2011 to 9.75% in 2030, showing the tendency of increasing at initial and then decreasing, which was consistent with the periodic change of labor. Under the level 56%, the proportion of abandoned land rises from16.43% in 2011 to 64.31% in 2030, showing an increasing trend, which reflects the effects of actually reduced rural population and cyclically reduced rural population on farmland transfer. Assuming that under the citizenization rate level 3%, the consequence of the local government‘s forcible propulsion of farmland transfer was that the marginal labor force population at the ages of 45-70 in Jinhuang Group within 20 years of transfer term increases from 33 to 113, a large portion of this group of people could have difficulties in working in cities and have risks of losing jobs and land. Therefore, the artificial society model of farmland transfer confirmed the basic characteristics of endogenous-type transfer and the existing rationality and local governments‘ premature advance behaviors could destroy the reproduction of peasant household labor and encroach on peasants‘ interests.On the basis of existing researches, the innovation of this study was reflected in the following two aspects:One innovation was to develop research methods. Farmland transfer artificial society model provided a virtual computational experiment for farmland transfer researches and it could simulate farmland transfer society system from bottom to top under certain hypothetical conditions. By changing research objects and properties of environment artificially, it verified the social phenomena and relationships in household inherent transfer, which was highly efficient and low cost. Applying this method could simulate reliable result and provide a new research method for the rural land transfer.Compared with the developed areas on plains, another innovative was that the household inherent transfer was still a major transfer form and development normalcy in the under-developed hilly areas. Inherent transfer showed regionality, stage reasonable values and positive benefits. Current researches on the household inherent transfer emphasized more on economy and efficiency, while it was important to recognize the consideration of efficiency and justice in farmland transfer and solve ―three agriculture‖ problems by studying inherent transfer social functions, thereby providing a new perspective for farmland transfer researches and enriching farmland transfer theory.
Keywords/Search Tags:farmland transfer, inherent transfer, social function, artificial society, MAIA
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