The Dissolution Of "Anti-behaviour":Operational Dilemmas And Responses In Large-scale Water Construction During The Collectivisation Period

During the collectivisation period,the party and government carried out extensive water conservation campaigns in rural areas across the country,and in this collective peasant participation,peasant behaviour could have a very profound impact on the relationship between the state and the peasants.The problematic issue in this paper is how the state responded to the irregular behaviour of the militia during a major water construction project during the collectivisation period,and how it resolved the problems that arose so that the project could be completed on schedule,hoping to explore the relationship between the state and the peasants through the lens of peasant behaviour.The main research methods used in this thesis are case study,documentary and interview methods,and interviews with elderly people who participated in the project,supplemented by later access to relevant archives and documents,in an attempt to restore the full picture of events to the greatest extent possible.This thesis focuses on the whole process of the participation of L village in the Jiao Lai River regulation project in Gaomi County,Shandong Province,during the collectivisation period:firstly,it explains the preparatory and pre-construction stages of the water conservancy project,and the participation of L villagers’ militia in the construction of the project,which was not sufficiently prepared for the work and was a major cause of problems in the construction of the project;secondly,as the project progressed,the objective conditions and the backwardness of the management model led to the militia This phenomenon gradually drew the attention of the higher authorities,who began to take measures to try to deal with it.Not only were the projects eventually completed successfully,but they also gave the peasants a new understanding of the state,while at the same time the peasants realised that they could also play a role and many no longer responded passively to the arrangements made by their superiors.The analysis revealed that the state could improve the system by strengthening supervision and providing positive incentives for farmers to ’steal’,’grind’ and ’neglect’their work during the massive water construction activities of the collectivisation period.The state could improve the system by strengthening supervision and providing positive incentives to discourage such behaviour.On the other hand,both the state and the peasants are an important part of this relationship,and the relationship between the state and the peasants is in a constant state of adjustment,so how to form an effective interaction is of great help in studying the relationship between the state and the peasants in modern times;at the same time,how to properly respond to the behaviour of the peasants also has certain implications for the current reform in rural China.