Trust And Development Of Rural Cooperatives

To lead country people to develop rural cooperative organizations is one of the measures to construct New Countryside. Since 1950s, the Land Reform and the later Cooperation Campaign built the foundations of Communist organizations among rural grass-roots. The structure of traditional Chinese rural society changed radically.At the beginning of the 21^st Century, Chinese Communist Party proposed the project of "Construction of New Countryside" and encourages people to develop rural cooperative organizations. Under this historical background, my paper focuses on the field work of the case in Rui'an of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, the birthplace of "Wenzhou mode".My paper is based on the social capital theory by the American scholar F. Fukuyama. Starting from the perspective of "Trust", it consults what happened in Rui'an and investigates rural cooperative organizations.In detailed analyses, my paper sets the interplay between government's promoting and social capital as a starting point. Focusing on the condition of trust in the countryside, my investigation is presented as follows:Firstly, after surveying rural trust situation, there is a point that it is difficult and unfeasible for country people to establish cooperative organizations spontaneously. So the paper suggests that the establishment of rural cooperative organizations inevitably requires direction and promotion of the government. Meanwhile, referring to the case study in Rui'an, the government should consider the situation of trust in the countryside and direct and assist country people through indirect measures such as comprehensive agricultural associations.Secondly, my paper analyzes the relationship between trust range and the scale of a cooperative organization and argues that the scale of such organizations should be in line with the trust range. At the same time, because the trust range cannot go beyond acquaintances, rural elites are cores and hubs to achieve multi-layer combination of the cooperative organizations.In short, the paper argues that there is a very close relationship between trust and the establishment and the scale of a rural cooperative organization. This subject is worthy of further exploration.