Across The Country: The City Traffic Operators Peasants Urbanization Practices

With the sustainable development of Chinese economy and urbanization, a large number of farmers swarm into cities. The procession of urbanization has changed the situation of China and has a great influence on the development of China in future. In view of this, the urbanized and related research has inspired researchers’ interest; in particular, the study of rural labors has become an important focus and caused wide discussion in the academic circles.In fact, the large number of rural population living in cities has been differentiated into diverse groups; besides engaging in manual labors, the rural migrants in business activities also account for large proportion. The ways that they adapt to city life are diverse and multiple, which manifest the characteristic of polymorphism. However, the existing research ignores the differential characteristics, that is, most of the research merely takes the ’rural labors’ as a focus without considering t diversity and variety of his group’s practical experience. In addition, the thesis also attempts to examine the discourse expression of the concept the migrant workers which has the tendency of ignoring their subjectivity in that both in academic expression and in mass media, the rural migrants were consciously or unconsciously regarded as a problematic group. As a result, The discourses, experiences, and narrative subjectivity of migrated peasants are ignored, and then lead to the construction of the weak discourse expression systemBased on the review of previous researches, the author aims to build a subject narrative mode by emphasizing the farmers’subjectivity in terms of adapting to the urban life, the significance of which is to expand the research path on countrymen’s urbanization, reveal the polymorphism of their adaptability. Specifically, the thesis takes the businessmen who are from downtown and now engage in their business in Xinfadi wholesale markets of agricultural products as research object and makes effort to explore their situation in Beijing city. The author has found out that they has been the indispensable agricultural product-brokers or agricultural merchants by way of taking advantage of rural agricultural resources, catering to the need of city development and expansion, collecting information of agricultural products and connecting urban and rural areas. Through the analysis and cognition of this group, the author examines the traits of this group and the way they seize opportunities, employ their own resources and successfully integrate into urban environment in the end.In addition, the author discusses the market-based community that businessmen from rural area gathered to form and believe that ’the market-community’plays a very active and important role in the elimination of urban-rural gap. On one hand, businessmen coming from rural area can get economic status and break the limitation of urban-rural dual system; on the other hand they can integrate into city life in social status, social capital and psychological identity. Based on the analysis above, the thesis shows that’the market-community’ and businessmen’s social capital are a superposed resource that provides a rare opportunity for the migrants to adapt to city life. Also it provides an opportunity for reconstruction of equal and win-win relationship between urban and rural areas.