Peasant Cooperation And Village Order In The Social Change

Facing the academic controversies of "the difficulties for peasant cooperation" and the demands for peasant organization in the building of a new socialist countryside, our study focuses on the peasant cooperation and village order. Concerning about the peasant fates and rural development, I attempt to analyze the history and current situation of china peasant cooperation, and consider the way through which the peasants can escape the predicament of cooperation, to strengthen the extent of peasant organization and achieve the continuous development in rural country.Peasant cooperation means that peasants cooperate with others to achieve such a social interacting process which is mutual advantage for each of them, because it is difficult to solve the problems in producing and in life by each family alone. There are rich practice experiences of peasant cooperation in china rural area. We can classify these complicated peasant cooperation phenomena into two categories in terms of their forms : the one is in the forms of social exchange networks; the other is in the forms of collective actions. The former always appears as the mutual aid in the social relation network, the latter always emerges as the concerted action in the group or community. The former provides private consumption goods, the latter provides collective consumption goods. The article describes and comparatively analyzes the specific circumstances of the two forms of cooperation in different historic periods.In the tradition period, the peasants keep self-sufficient basically, except for limited market exchanges, peasants also use the social exchanges to meet each other's needs in their social network. This kind of cooperation mainly includes inter-cooperation in agricultural producing and grand rituals. Moreover, the village needs some public goods, such as security protection and relief aid, and so on. Clan organization and family force do much in organizing collective cooperation. In traditional rural china, whatever social exchanging cooperation, or collective action cooperation, these limited cooperation meet the needs what peasants need in producing and living very effectively, and achieve endogenetic and moral village orders.In the redistribution period, nongovernmental and informal peasant cooperation were replaced by governmental and formal cooperative institutions gradually. Particularly in the production field, from Mutual Aid Teams to Elementary Cooperative, then, from High Cooperative to People's Communes, the qualities of peasant cooperation were alienated step by step, at last, the voluntary mutual aid of peasant cooperation became helpless collective work under the leadership of the nation. The civil spontaneous cooperation only limited in the living field by neighbourhood mutual-aids and less in amount. Though the government maintains the cooperation apparently using force, but the uncooperative action in commune presents along with its birth. Those actions include passive resistance in production and getting more in distribution. As time flows, the uncooperative action began to amend the social institutions, and changed the strong administrative and exogenous village order finally.In the transformation period, neighbourhood mutual-aid as social exchange once resumed, and functioned in local market especially at the initial of the reform. But with the deepen of the reform and the broaden of market, market exchange instead of most neighbourhood mutual-aid. And the limited neighbourhood mutual-aid in the economic field can not meet the needs of peasants anymore with the developing of market economy. The cooperation which offer public goods and act as collective action were difficult to achieved and became less, for the national force's secession and the shortage of organizational resource (the village autonomy don't work well in organizing peasant cooperation). The two kinds of peasant cooperation face the dilemma in the transformation period, that is the problem of "the difficulty of peasant cooperation". At the same time, some villages troubled with the disorder. But, because of vast area and the variation of village circumstances and "local knowledges", there are many examples of peasant cooperation in the village or cross-villages. Such as new peasant professional economic cooperation organization, and peasant association and the cultural-entertainment groups. These civil organizations are the products of peasant cooperation, but also the effective carriers through witch peasants can learn to cooperate and promote the cooperation capacity. The contractual civil organization that insist on the principle of voluntary and equality and reciprocity represent the tendency of our peasant cooperation in one time. The form of civil organization helps to reach the new consultative and endogenous-exogenous symbiosis village order.We place our study of peasant cooperation in the theory framework "social structure-social relation-social action". People are embedded in the social structural conditions and the social relation network. But these "embeddedness" are not passive restrains. People can take advantage of these conditions to create some opportunities through which they can change the current and achieve their social goals. For peasants, when they face the troubles and problems from producing and living that they can not solve by themselves, they carry out every structures and relational resources to form a collective action, this process is just social relevance in the village. Through the "social relevance", social agent, social relationship and social structure are combined organically and dynamically. In the process of social relevance, peasant cooperation is realized. Specifically, main element which affect the social relevance and peasant cooperation as follows: the quality and level of the economic development; the quality and Concentration of power; the value orientation of culture; the quantity and quality of organizations; the quality and density of social relationship; people's concept about public-private; the function of social elite.The study about peasant cooperation and village order reflects the repeated and recurred linkages relations between social action and social order. Under certain social order restrictions, the agent take some action to maintain, perfect, even breakthrough old social order. Social order is the product of agent's relevant social actions, and promotes agent's relevant social actions conversely.