Social Capital: A New Perspective For Understanding Cooperation Among Peasants

Generally speaking ,there are two ways to solve the dilemma of cooperation among peasants One way is integrating social members into one unity by means of power from government; the other way is by means of market, that is through privation In my view, these two ways are not plausible in contemporary China. As to these, there are reasons as follows: although our country has suggested constructing socialist new village, enlarge investment in the village, public goods and public services will cover villages to a larger extent However, there exists imbalance of development among different villages, as a result, the government is not possible to provide enough public goods and services for all agricultural regions, and due to wide range of agricultural regions, distant country has no such ability to take them into account, as a result, government's failure emerges; it's difficult to control the externality of public goods, thus private market is not willing to provide public goods, social welfare will be decreased if the public goods are kept from using by means of paying fees, thus, market failure arises; Given the importance of public goods for peasants' production and life, public goods must be provided In this article, I attempt to put forward a third way, That's to say ,we depend on social capital to integrate peasants so as to solve the scarce problem of rural public goods Because rural social capital arises from rural community, and social capital is the social basis of cooperation among peasants, so I regard it as a new way. In this paper, the author analyses the role that social capital plays in promoting cooperation among peasants, measure the status of the social capital in the village and put forward relevant solutions to maintaining and cultivating the social capital in the village, finally we suggest we take advantage of the positive functions of social capital and avoiding it's negative functions...