Social Role Transition For Landless Farmers

With the rapid development of China’s economy, we have seen the vigorous growth of cities. The expanding of cities causes a large demand for land, which leads to a large-scale land acquisition and a lot of landless farmers in suburban areas.After farmers’ losing their lands, the government let landless farmers live in cities and give them the urban household registration. The change of living environment and household registration status has taken landless farmers into a new environment. Facing the new environment, landless farmers have to change themselves, learn urban culture and internalize the public role, which will help them to be citizens. After reading the existing literature, the author found that the relevant literature about landless farmers is abundant, but the paper on role transition is few. The transition from farmers to citizens is a part of farmers’ urbanization, which is related to the development of urbanization in China and the harmony and stability of society. Research on role transition of landless farmers will help to enrich farmers’ theory and give references to migrant workers’ research. Therefore, the study on role transition of landless farmers will have a significant effect on theories and practices.This paper takes village J as an example and uses social role theory as the theoretical perspective. The research is based on field survey, which uses interviews and observation method to collect information. The thesis has given a brief description of the current of role transition of landless farmers, analyzed the problems of role transition and found the factors which affect role transition of landless farmers. The results are as follows:Firstly, the social role of suburban landless farmers remains the characteristics of farmers now, whether the role behavior or the role concept. Secondly, when landless farmers began their role transition, they faced a lot of problems which are related to many aspects, such as role determination, role internalization, role practice and environmental constraints. Thirdly, the restricting factors which affect role transition of landless farmers include the identity of people empowerment, the role distance and the enthusiasm of farmers.In order to realize the goal of role transition, we need the cooperation of farmers, government and citizens. Therefore, this paper gives advice from the perspective of farmers, governments and citizens.