A Sociological Analysis Of The Collective Appealing Of Peasants Losing Their Land

Since the 1990's,all along with the rapid development of Chinese industrialization and the continuous acceleration of urbanization, the demand for land has greatly increased. In order to meet the need of economic development for land, the state has undertaken large-scale land expropriation and housing removal, among which the expropriation of rural collective land is the most intense. In the expropriating process, peasants' interests have been infringed upon greatly and those peasants having lost their land are now faced with the crisis of survival, due to such factors as the unsound compensation system, the rather low compensation standard of land expropriation, and the grass-root governments' violation of regulations and so on. Accordingly, more and more peasants, through mass collective appealing or violent actions, strive to protect their own interests, so as to safeguard their rights. However, conflicts caused by land expropriation are imperiling the social harmony and stability. This thesis, on the basis of the description and analysis of peasants' collective appealing, interprets the logic and rationality of peasants' collective action in depth. The thesis includes five parts: Part One, The Introduction, puts forward the problem, explains the significance of the study, the research method, defines the core concepts, and sorts out the research status of the Collective Action Theory and collective appealing. Part Two gives an overview of the natural conditions of village L, and describes, in details, the background and process of the collective appealing of peasants losing their land. Part Three offers an interpretation of the logic of peasants' collective action, based on the description of some concrete events of appealing to higher authorities for help. Part Four reveals the rationality of peasants through analyzing strategies employed by them in collective actions.