The Construction Of Social Suppoer Network For Landless Peasant

With the overall promotion of China’s urbanization process, the demand for land isincreasing dramatically. An action named “get out of village and settle in the city” are carriedout by many provinces and cities, a large number of rural land has been changed into urbanland, which leads to a growing number of landless peasants. The new approach is carried outby many provinces and cities to solve the tensions of urban construction. A growing numberof landless peasants are integrated to live in an urban community under the new land policyand institutional arrangements.The fact that landless peasants move to a urban community linked by businessrelationships from a rural community bonded by kinship and geopolitical relationships, maylead to some changes in landless peasants’ original social support network. A natural questioncomes up: Whether a new social support network could be constructed and what kind ofdifficult will be faced in the process of constructing the new social support network if theoriginal of the landless peasants’ social support network is facing the crisis of weaken anddisintegration?In this paper, landless peasants’ social support networks of Community F in Wuhan,Hubei province has been studied by the use of literature, questionnaires and interviews from asociological point of view. Findings are as follows: The average size of landless peasants’emotional support network, economic support network and employment support network is2.61,2.56, and2.16respectively; Network convergence is high and network heterogeneity islow; The proportion of relatives is greater than the proportion of the non-relatives; The mostimportant relationships for landless peasants are their children, spouse, parents, brothers andsisters and friends.In the process of citizenization, as promulgated by their own limitations and system,landless peasants have trouble in adjusting to life in city, which may cause the construction ofsocial support network more difficult. The plight of construction landless peasants’ socialsupport network has been discussed from both informal and formal social support networksides by using the perspective and methods of social network analysis in this paper. The dissociation of primary social relationship and the dearth of secondary social relationship areleading causes of the difficult to construct the informal social support networks.While themajor reason for the difficult to construct the formal social support networks is the lack ofsupport from government and community. In the last part, the strategy to construct the socialsupport network of landless peasants is analyzed based on the problems found in the survey.In order to construct the informal social support network, landless peasants should strengthenthe social support from primary social relationships and integrate social support fromsecondary social relationship. On the construction of the formal social support network, thegovernment and the community should cooperate to help landless peasants integrate into citylife as soon as possible. Specifically, the government should provide legal and policy supportto landless peasants and the community should focus on building a resourceful community.