Managing Of Small-Peasants:Practical Strategies Of De-Involution For The Family

The No.1 document of the Central Government in 2018 clearly pointed out that the organic connection between small-peasants and modern agriculture should be promoted.Since then,the status of small-peasants as the agricultural production operator has been emphasized and confirmed.In the academia,whether smallholder farming or farming has always been a controversial topic,and the relevant discussion is not only limited to China,but also extended to East Asia,Europe and America.A central question of discussion is: what is the most suitable form of the agricultural operation organization? Considering the history and tradition of East Asia,small-peasants have been considered as an important subject of agricultural operation.Thus,this paper takes Village T in the hilly mountainous region of northeast Sichuan as a field site,and analyzes the action strategies adopted by small-peasants in the process of “marketization of production” by sorting out the history of agricultural and rural transformation after the broken-up of the people’s communes,so as to present the logic of small-peasants’ actions under the household agricultural management.The study attempts to dialogue with the classical theories on small-peasants,and further discusses the problem of “involution and de-involution of agriculture” under the conditions of full economic and social development in the new era,so as to see how small-peasants adapt agricultural modernization.The study found that the transformation of agriculture in village T after land redistribution can be summarized as a shift from subsistence farming to market-embedded profit-making farming.Moreover,the completion and sustainability of this household agricultural management of de-involution through market-oriented production relies on both family resilience and social conditions.From the perspective of small-peasants’ development strategies,within the household,they have flexibly adjusted their household type to provide a source of motivation for sustainable household development.Specifically,at the stage of earning a living,small-peasants are faced with the double contradiction of“involution”,which prevents them from transferring surplus labor,and “leisure”,which weakens the family’s development capacity.For this reason,small-peasants adopted the social system of “sharing stoves but not families”,which stimulated the labor passion of family members while maintaining their close relationship.In the profit-making stage,small-peasants face the pressure of increasing livelihood costs and livelihood risks,so they do not reinforce the “family separation system”,but rather support the family’s sustainable development with strong intergenerational cooperation.This resilient intergenerational relationship and family structure has adapted to the family goals at different stages of development,and has also responded to the impact of changes in the social environment,such as urbanization and marketization,on small-scale family business models.In terms of social foundation,the “de-collectivization” represented by the collapse of the irrigation water system provided the conditions for small-peasants to gain business autonomy and exercise their business autonomy,and the spontaneous continuation of the “labor exchange” cooperation model and the “suosuo” labor exchange cooperation model have also led to a solid village community.As a result,Village T has developed a production field consisting of a non-coercive policy environment,a public sphere for continuous experimentation and information accumulation,and a tightly interwoven network of social relations.In this way,small-peasants mitigate the uncertainty and risk of market shocks and create a stable production and trading environment for the “marketization of production”.Finally,the article discusses the logic of small-peasants’ actions and their subjectivity in the process of agricultural and rural modernization.Small-peasants are a family-based agricultural production organization,and their agricultural labor practices are not just as “production”,but more as “management”.By allocating and using the family’s labor resources,arable land resources,and social relationship resources,smallholder farmers form diverse livelihood strategies around the organizational goal of family continuity,and the change of these livelihood strategies is not only a transformation of agricultural production methods,but also a continuous adjustment of family management methods.In contemporary China,under the influence of multiple natural and social environments,such as land fragmentation,prominent human-land conflict,difficulties in transferring surplus labor,and unstable working environment,this small-scale management model with the family as the basic unit will persist as the livelihood strategy of small-peasants,and promoting the organic connection between small-peasants and modern agriculture remains an important issue in the modernization of Chinese agriculture and rural areas.