Farmers’ Social Relationship And Endogenous Farmland Transfer Network:Embeddedness And Localization

Farmland transfer is a common practice under the framework of rural land management system in China.It is of great significance for promoting the optimal allocation of agricultural resources,promoting large-scale agricultural operations,improving agricultural production efficiency,and increasing farmers’ income.It is an important issue for rural revitalization.Farmland transfer is not only universal at the practical level,but also has exploration value at the theoretical level.From the perspective of the classical economics,a large number of papers have discussed how to optimize the allocation of agricultural land as a scarce resource,and proposed a series of practical optimization paths around property rights definition,market improvement and government intervention.In terms of research methods,many studies,based on large-sample panel data and complex quantitative analysis methods,have demonstrated the basic situation of farmland circulation,which provides a basis for understanding the fundamentals of farmland circulation in China.However,it is an indisputable fact that,different from the assumptions from the Western classical economics,affected by cultural traditions and social-economic development levels,farmland circulation in China still has obvious endogenous characteristics,that is,farmland circulation is based on the acquaintance society full of blood and neighborhood relations,and it has non-market characteristics such as small transaction scope,simple transaction process,and prominent personalization characteristics.Judging from the process and results of the investigation and analysis,farmland transfer is a practical behavior formed by the interaction of market logic and social values,and is the joint result of the game of two forces.Therefore,it is difficult to explain why endogenous farmland transfer exists in large numbers and operates stably in practice just with economic theories.From a methodological point of view,large sample data and measurement tools can easily fall into the analysis error of statistical averaging,and it is difficult to capture a lot of useful information and details in the process of farmland transfer,such as farmer relations,daily interaction,and transaction processes,so it cannot support more indepth theoretical explanations.Based on the above realistic concerns and the possibility of theoretical and methodological improvement and optimization,this paper will focus on the embeddedness and localization of endogenous farmland circulation.The characteristics of farmland transfer and its formation mechanism provide inspiration and reference for the practice of farmland transfer and optimization of rural governance.Through innovations and improvements in interpretation perspectives and research methods,it will deeply explore the characteristics and formation mechanisms of endogenous farmland transfer in China,and then provide inspiration and reference for the practice of farmland transfer and rural governance optimization.Based on a comprehensive review of relevant literature at home and abroad,this study clarified the concepts of "endogenous farmland transfer","transfer network","social relationship","embeddedness" and "localization".Taking a natural village(Huangjing Village)in the central region as a case study,this research constructed and described the farmers’ relationship network and endogenous farmland transfer network at three time points in 2000,2010 and 2020 by collecting the long-term data on social relations and farmland transfer of 341 households.Based on the new classical analysis framework,the formation mechanism of endogenous farmland circulation network under the family decision of labor division was systematically analyzed,and the influence of farmer social relationship network on the endogenous farmland circulation network was discussed through the relationship embedding effect and structural embedding effect.On this basis,the empirical analysis framework of QAP and(S)TERGM were established to test the relational embedding effect and structural embedding effect of farmers’ social relationship network and endogenous farmland transfer network.The main results and conclusions obtained are as follows:First,the "Small-World Phenomenon" of the farmers’ social network is gradually weakening or disappearing,and the scattered communities formed by blood and neighborhood relationship in the farmers’ social network are gradually loosening.In 2000,the social relationship network of farmers in Huangjing Village had a high average clustering coefficient and a short average path length,reflecting the "smallworld effect".However,with the decrease of the active nodes number in the farmer’s social network,the average clustering coefficient generally shows a downward trend,while the average path length shows an upward trend.The disappearance speed of the numbers of node connection in the network exceeds the contraction speed of the network scale.The aggregation becomes less obvious,the connection function becomes more imperfect,and the "small-world effect" of the network is gradually weakening or even disappearing.Besides,in 2000,the social relationship network of farmers in Huangjing Village had obvious characteristics of blood and neighborhood community,which were generally manifested as a large discrete community and several small scattered communities and a small number of isolated nodes.However,with the continuous development of urbanization,more small-scale communities and even isolated nodes have been appeared within the social relationship network,and the network structure is more fragmented.From the perspective of the overall structure of the network,the density of the social relationship networks of farmers are generally not high and shows a downward trend year by year,indicating that a very loose social network has been formed between farmer households,however,the network structure has become more loose over time,and the social relations of farmers in the village tend to be decentralized and atomized.Second,the neighborhood relationship is weakened and the blood relationship is still close.In terms of the internal changes of the farmers’ social relationship network,the farmers’ neighborhood communication network has changed most obviously over time,and the density and centrality of the neighborhood communication network have declined significantly.The neighborhood connections that maintain rural community’s vitality have been seriously damaged,and the relationship between neighbors has become estranged.Otherwise,the change of farmers’ network of favors exchange and mutual aid by trust is small,and the network scale reduction is relatively not obvious.The relationship of favors exchange which based on blood and kinship still plays an important role in the daily communication of villagers,and becomes more and more important in the farmers’ social network later.Third,local community structure in the endogenous farmland transfer network is significant.In 2000,the farmland transfer in Huangjing Village was relatively few,and the farmers involved in the transfer were scattered in each production team,which means that there were many small discrete connecting pieces in the network.With the continuous development of farmland transfer,the number of large-scale farmers was always increased,the farmland transfer among small farmers at the early stage gradually turned into the transfer between small farmers and large grain farmers.In the endogenous farmland transfer network,more and more small pieces of connectivity in the surrounding local areas are gradually attached to the "hub" nodes(large grain growers).And the number of network connectivity pieces decreased rapidly,which leading to several more concentrated local community structures in the network.At the same time,the entropy of network connectivity pieces was increasing,which indicate that the scale and level of local structure communities in the network differed greatly.Fourth,the heterogeneity of network structure of endogenous farmland transfer is prominent.From 2000 to 2020,the heterogeneity of node indegree,node in-strength and transfer relationship strength in the endogenous farmland transfer network of Huangjing Village has been increasing,which indicates that the status difference of nodes in the network has gradually become unequal.The imbalance of the overall structure of the endogenous farmland transfer network has been further aggravated,and the ability of some farmers with more farmland to control farmland resources in the network has become more prominent,which also leads to a single transfer mode within the network,and the ability to resist external risks is limited.Fifth,there is a relational embeddedness between farmers’ social relationship network and endogenous farmland transfer network.From2000 to 2020,there was a positive correlation between the farmers’ social relationship network and the endogenous farmland transfer network,but it showed a decreasing trend.Among them,the correlation coefficient between the favours exchange network,the neighborhood communication network and the endogenous farmland transfer network decreased gradually but remained significant positive correlation,while the correlation of mutual aid by trust network gradually became insignificant over time,which shows that the relational embeddedness between the farmers’ social relationship network and the endogenous farmland transfer network become weaken over time.The main reason is that the social relationship network of farmers is gradually weakened by the impact of marketization,resulting in a significant decline in its impact on endogenous farmland transfer.Sixthly,there is structural embeddedness between farmers’ social relationship network and endogenous farmland transfer network.The structural characteristics of farmers embedded in the social relationship network have a significant positive impact on the endogenous farmland transfer network,specifically manifested in the following aspects: farmers with high degree centrality in the social relationship network are more likely to transfer farmland with each other,and farmers with higher degree centrality are more prone to transfer farmland,and are more active in the inflow of farmland,thus owning and controlling more farmland transfer relationships.With the passage of time,the structural embeddedness between the farmers’ social relationship network and the endogenous farmland transfer network has been weakened,among which the neighborhood communication network has the most obvious decline.Compared with the existing studies,the possible innovations of this paper are as follows: First,taking a local practice case of spontaneous farmland transfer in a village as the background material,based on the embeddedness theory,the mechanism of farmers’ social network on endogenous farmland transfer localization process was explained,and the complexity of the farmland circulation network in a village and its overall or local evolution process over time were compared and analyzed from the perspective of dynamic network,which makes up for the shortcomings of the research on the localization process of spontaneous farmland circulation and the village-scale farmland circulation;Second,it regarded the endogenous farmland transfer in a village as a whole network from the perspective of network.On this basis,combining the analysis concept of social network and the analysis indicators of complex network,this paper compared and analyzed the complexity and the overall or local evolution process of the farmland transfer network in a village over time,which enriched and improved the current research of farmland transfer;The third was to proposed an analysis framework of the embeddedness of farmers’ social relationships and farmland transfer network,which integrated multidisciplinary theories,and had the characteristics of dealing with complex systems,and was suitable for explaining the localization process of current endogenous farmland transfer;The forth was to provide an empirical analysis model of endogenous farmland transfer network with considering the dynamics,which can test the different roles played by various network structures and actor attributes in the network formation process,so as to further elucidate the underlying mechanism of endogenous farmland transfer.