An Analysis Of Changes Of The Agricultural Production Mode During The Thirty-year Reforms In China

Currently, during the process of the agricultural market transition, there are many problems which are difficult to be completely explained using previous economic theories. These require us to innovate in the theoretical perspective. From the perspective of symbolic capital, a variety of technology and mechanism plays an important role during the process of transition. The investigation and analysis of them is a new attempt. Although the symbol of power may exist in any society and any field, due to the impact of China’s special historical basis, the power of symbol in our agriculture field has its own specificity during the agriculture production and reproduction process.And it also produces a special dominant effect, which brings unexpected problems to western experience.First of all, through a review of the "materialized" agricultural production mode in the abstract economy theory, this paper draws forth cultural economics and the symbolic economy theory by Bourdieu, and highlights their importance of analyzing and solving problems in the field of agricultural production in China so as to set up the perspective of symbolic economy. Secondly, this paper makes an analysis of the historical and basic issues for the development of modern agriculture-that is, communes and the concurrent business of farmers, to point out the "system locking" of the modern agricultural changes brought about by the political powers and skills and the traditional production pattern. Then, this paper points out the decisive role of the nation in breaking this kind of "system locking", the attempts to break the "system locking" and the following series of positive system constructions. But what is even more important is that we should know that the various attempts concerning about systems by our country did not perform smooth promoting functions for the changes of the modes of agricultural production. This paper focuses on the functions exerted on the symbolic power reproduction by the strategy of the retreating the formal authority of the State from the urban areas to conduct market-oriented reforms. First of all, create antonymous space in a non-institutionalized and centralized system. Secondly, penetrate the operation of the power relations into the relationship of people’s daily lives and start microcosmic reproductions. These two kinds of symbolic power controls are main reasons for the ruining of antonymous spaces of farms and the markets these farmers develops. That is for the fundamental and unchanging symbolic power reproduction that various difficulties are now presented before us during the critical juncture of today’s agricultural system. At the end of this paper, on the basis of comparisons, the limitations of the institutional economics analytical means are discussed. Moreover, based on the facts, this paper sets up a discussion on the importance and the prospects of this kind of analyses on symbolic powers in view of understanding agricultural problems and other economic and social problems.