Making The Inclusion By Participation:Study Of Rural-Urban Transformation Of Land-Lost Peasants

Since the 1990s,with the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization in China,the farmland around urban built-up areas has been expropriated to build urban roads,factories and commercial houses.In recent years,the wave of development of university towns and the new high-tech industrial parks has further occupied the cultivated land in the suburbs.Following the institutional arrangement of the government,suburban villages are forced to be involved in the tide of marketization.Large-scale collective land has been expropriated and houses have been demolished and relocated.The ‘expropriation' not only accelerates the process of urbanization artificially,but also brings about great changes in rural society and its population.This change is multi-dimensional and deep.Land-lost peasants are compressed into urban space in a short time and they are facing great changes in the form of labor,life style and psychology.It has aroused widespread concern by social public.In this study,qualitative research method was adopted to systematically explore the process of rural-urban transformation of land-lost peasants through a large number of interviews and observations in five counties(districts)of H city,revealing the true scene and operational logic of land-lost peasants' participation in the process.Based on the theory and reality of‘passive urbanization',regarding land-lost peasants as the action subjects and taking‘participation-inclusion' as the main analysis framework,this paper provides a relatively comprehensive research perspective and analysis path from the dimensions of structure and transition.The rural-urban transformation of land-lost peasants includes two specific stages.The first is the stage of urban migration,that is,the process of transformation from the role of traditional peasants to land-lost peasants.The second is the stage of urban inclusion,that is,the transformation process from the role of land-lost peasants to citizens.Urban migration is the starting point of rural-urban transformation,and urban inclusion is the final result of rural-urban transformation.This paper will analyze the participation status of these two alternating stages.From the structural dimension,this paper discusses from the overall and individual levels.On the overall level,land-lost peasants,as a specific group,lack the right to speak and have a low participation rate in the stage of urban migration.It is difficult for them to fully participate in interest negotiation and game in institutionalized channels,and they can only passively accept the institutional arrangements of the government.In the stage of entering the city and gradually integrating into the city,land-lost peasants have not been able to quickly change their roles or fully participate in the economy,society,politics and culture as citizens,thus forming a differentiated urban inclusion pattern which deepens on the basis of cultural lag.Limited participation has brought about a series of inconsistent scenarios of rural-urban transformation,where land-lost peasants are always at the bottom of the land income distribution chain,unable to obtain fair land dividends and urbanization benefits.Most of them are located in the middle and lower levels of the city in terms of subjective identification and objective reality,becoming marginal groups of the city.Not able to obtain reasonable and expected land dividends,so land-lost peasants compete with other main bodies around the core of ‘interests' which leads to a series of social contradictions.On the individual level,land-lost peasants have been differentiated and have different participation consciousness and actions.Based on this dimension,Land-lost peasants can be divided into three types: positive enterprising,passive adaptation and conservative adherence.Individual intrinsic subject difference is an important factor which drives their participation force discrepant.In addition,there are social structural factors,especially the unbalanced distribution of external forces such as government,community,social organization and collective economy,creating different opportunities for land-lost peasants' participation in different regions.Under the combined effect of the above,the shared picture of differentiation is shaped: in the social stratification system,some people move upward into the elite class and most people keeps the same horizontal mobility,while a few people move downward to the bottom.From the dimension of transition,land expropriation is a long-term evolution process.Over the course of three decades,land-lost peasants' subjective consciousness has been increasingly strengthened and their participation in action has been gradually expanded,resulting in changes in many aspects,such as the content and form of sharing.This change is mainly manifested in two aspects: first,from deprivation-type expropriation to welfare-type one,the land dividend and urban welfare of land-lost peasants show a gradual upward trend;second,from community inclusion to community integration,no longer blindly passive obedience,land-lost peasants stick to the original culture in a some-round way.Some people begin to realize the value of rural culture,and try to keep some of their own culture and influence urban society with their actions,thus making community integration possible.Based on the above two dimensions of analysis,we can find that although a series of forms of participation are emerging in the process of rural-urban transformation today,the pattern is not ideal.There are many problems such as personal interest-oriented motivation of participation,utilitarian participation empowerment of the government,unbalanced participants and disorderly ways of participation,which hinder the urban inclusion process of land-lost peasants.Different patterns of social participation shape different forms of urban inclusion,and positive participation plays an important role in promoting urban inclusion.Specifically,participation helps land-lost peasants to obtain material capital and power resources,psychological capital and human capital and social capital for urban inclusion.Therefore,the participation on a benign track is particularly necessary.Under this background,this paper carries out theoretical exploration and regards ‘cooperative participation' as the highest stage of participation ladder.Cooperative participation refers to the process in which two or more interested parties strive to achieve the goal of mutual benefit and equal rights by acting as participators and exerting influence on each other.It includes three elements: voluntary behavior,equal status and rational participation under the institutional framework.In practice,cooperative participation is bound with the active responses of participators,the support of social structure and the stimulation of the dynamic mechanism.This practice attempts to provide a new theoretical model for the rural-urban transformation involving land-lost peasants.