Remaking Peasant: A Sociological Study Of Interaction Between State, Society And Peasant

This dissertation focuses on a diachronic study on the social and cultural features of the peasants of the Aheqi state farm in Jinghe county of Xinjiang in a nearly 50-year period from the establishment of the state farm to now, and discusses the changes of these peasants happening in the interaction of the state, society and peasant himself.Adhering to the academic tradition, and employing the community research methods, the paper chooses the peasants of the state farm as the subjects, a production team as the target of a long-term field research, inspects individual farmers’living condition in social changes though interviewing 28 peasants in depth about their life history. State farms were established as agricultural enterprises to reform peasants and demonstrate the model of collective villages, attracting peasants from all provinces with their memory of the original villages. It is pointed out that these peasants undergoes three stages in the development of the state farm:the worker-like peasants in the initial stage of the state farm, the peasant-like workers after the policy of fixing farm output quotas for each household, and citizen-like peasants after the policy of small town construction.Before becoming to be the industrial workers of the state farm, in the first half of the 20th century, Chinese people were in a complex social environment in which it was full of social changes, regime changes, and frequent types of social movements, intertwined with wars, political movements, and social instability. In the meantime, there were no significant changes in the lifestyle, values, and level of productivity of traditional agricultural society, and there was a tightening contradiction between social unrest and the unchanged rural way of life, in which the traditional peasants were still in kinship network with "Self" as the center, but facing the government more and more directly. In the period between the establishment of the state farm and the policy of fixing farm output quotas for each household, the state power influenced the life of these peasants in almost every aspect. In the immigrant-dominating state farm, state shaped these peasants in many ways including land ownership, social production, lifestyle, ideology and culture, and peasants who left their hometown out of various reasons adjusted themselves to the government’s reform and became to be industrial workers of the state farm,that is worker-like peasants.After the policy of fixing farm output quotas for each household, their original social memory as peasants, family-based units becoming the reality of production and living environment again, the rational pursuit of maximum economic benefits and agriculture-dominating way of living made the members of the state farm live like traditional peasants, but the social culture based on the state farm distinguished them from the genuine local peasants. Gradually, they became the peasant-like workers.In 2002, the state farm started small town construction. As a result, the lives of workers correspondingly changed. Due to the influence of market economy, the penetration of new concept, the popularity of television culture, and nation’s policy orientation, there was an increasingly close relation between the members of the state farm and the outside world. The members of the state farm became citizen-like peasants.Throughout the fifty-year course of the farm members’transformation from traditional peasants to citizen-like peasants, the state plays a leading role in reforming peasants from the political, economic and cultural aspects, whereas the peasants don’t accept the reform passively and they adjust themselves to the state reform and social changes with the guidance of survival rationality and economic rationality. In this process, not only we can see the shadow of traditional peasants, can also see the characteristics of ideal peasants in the national will. With the development of market economy and the impact of globalization, the features of citizen in these peasants are becoming increasingly strong, which is the consequence of the combined influences from the state, society and peasants themselves.