Surviving Tension And Choice Hardship

The underground"Mark Six"spread rapidly in many rural communities and has great impact on local order of economy and life. It has become a social problem plaguing many villages especially in South China area. This study, from the sociological perspective, is to observe and take into account this phenomenon in order to have a scientific understanding and interpretation on the underground"Mark Six"of rural area and peasant family's behavior of buying the underground"Mark Six".This paper attempts to transcend the restraint of the four classical theories ' framework, including surviving peasants, exploited peasants, commercial peasants, and rational peasants, and advocates that knowing and understanding motivate and pattern of the peasant family's behavior again under the premise of analyzing the background of today' s economic transformation and changes of peasants' life. In process of the study, this paper investigates diachronically the course of happening and formation of the underground"Mark Six"in L village of south-east GuangXi province, lays emphasis on the peasant family's macroscopic level of changes of producing and living and microcosmic level of choosing process, in the way of combining macro and micro, and inquires into the root of the underground"Mark Six"in rural area and the logic of the peasant family's behavior of buying the underground"Mark Six". About the analyzing method, this paper introduces an interpretative concept of"socialized peasants", confirming that china's ontemporary peasants have moved into a new unprecedented historical period and been involved into a market-oriented, open, and flowing social system, and it's hard to find the character of traditional peasants, self-sufficient and closed-minded, on today's peasant who are very different from traditional peasants. The degree of socialized, market-oriented producing and life lead to a fundamental transformation of peasant families' surviving style and life content, thus the demand and life expectancy of peasant families has changed magnificently. The peasant family must adapt to requirements of socialized system, search for income sources in any way and by every means in order to buy commodities and service from the market. Only in this way can family members' sorts of demand for daily life and development be satisfied, otherwise, the life and surviving of peasant family is unimaginable.Xu Yong and some persons claim that the essence of socialization of peasants is currency, that is money costing is a prerequisite for socialized life for peasant family, so seeking sources of income and increasing the income becomes basic aim and motivate of peasant families' kinds of activities. Like most villages, L village' peasant families are facing the same contradiction and problem between small-scaled business and socialized demand. The diversification of life content and switch of surviving style resulted in growing demand of today' peasant family. Most peasant families can still only regard agriculture as a lasting source of revenue under the ground that sharp drop in agricultural income. At the same time, they are lack of any other effective channels of income and hard to maintain the constantly improving "basic needs of life", and this causes surviving tension to peasant family universally. This kind of surviving tension is not just a problem of food and clothing, but a question of peasant family causing by socialized living and expansion and diversification of consuming desires stimulated by external and internal factor. So the high odds of the underground "Mark Six" make it become a "possible way" for a large number of peasant families' attempting to defuse the surviving tension and pressure, who have limited choosing options. And this is one of the main conclusions of this paper.Furthermore, this paper found that the underground "Mark Six" actually in a sense reflects and expresses contemporary peasant families' changes of surviving and needs of life through microscopic examination of course of their buying the underground "Mark Six". Firstly, after the implementation of the household contract system, the nation's influence was withdrawn from rural areas and peasant' life, but it failed to establish and form corresponding countryside organization for peasants' public life. "Collective life has become a thing of memory." And then a part of the peasant families regard the underground "Mark Six" as the platform for public life and communication. Secondly, spiritual and cultural needs of peasants, the deficiency of rural cultural capital and lack of way of meeting the needs make some peasants take the underground "Mark Six" as one part of entertainment in their spare time. At last, it must be noted that, how to solve the economic problem of giving peasant families a stable source of revenue, reconstructing rural cultural capital to enrich peasant families' spiritual life, building an effective communicating platform of peasants public life is the very way to settle the problem of the underground "Mark Six" in rural areas fundamentally.At the academic level, this study believes that farmers'choosing behaviors are constrained by the objective and subjective factors, and obey the"life ration"logic which root in their social relation network. The basic goal of farmers'behavior is to seeking survival and changing contemporary condition. Therefore, we can understand the behavior of farmers buying the underground"Mark Six"in this way: it is an"alternative"way of seeking survival and changing survival condition and is a paradox choice on the ground of change of lifestyle and limited choice. In a certain sense, this behavior reflects farmers'current plight and subjective impulses.