徐宗阳 [Xu Zongyang], 内外有别：资本下乡的社会基础 [Varied Attitudes Toward Insiders and Outsiders: The Social Context of Capital Going to the Countryside]

Abstract

Recently, the value of rural Chinese areas has become increasingly prominent with the abolition of agricultural taxes, reform of rural land policy, and emphasis on rural agriculture in national policymaking. This has attracted more industrial and commercial enterprises to invest in and develop these areas, a trend known as ‘capital going to the countryside’. This has become a new phenomenon in rural China and is the empirical phenomenon on which the book focuses. Varied Attitudes Toward Insiders and Outsiders: The Social Context of Capital Going to the Countryside explores the social logic of capital going to the countryside based on an investigation of a corporate farm’s living conditions after moving to the northern Chinese countryside. Why is the industrial and commercial capital that funds agricultural operations in the countryside prone to slow progress? What difficulties and problems are prominent in these entrepreneurial farms ? What are the specific mechanisms and reasoning behind this phenomenon? These are the core issues that the book addresses. Unlike prior literature, which has attributed the failure of capital going to the countryside to issues related to supervision, incentives, and funds, Xu regards it as the bumpy interaction between external capital and rural society and summarizes it as an action logic of ‘varied attitudes toward insiders and outsiders’. In the literature review in chapter 2, Xu first examines the phenomenon of capital going to the countryside based on the macroscopic structural background of China’s urbanization model and government behavior transformation. After the tax-sharing reform, Chinese local governments’ transformation from operating businesses to operating land and the return of a significant number of resources and projects to the countryside have provided opportunities for capital to go to the countryside. Xu suggests that the outsider plight resulting from this phenomenon cannot be understood simply as a business management problem. Instead, we should probe into corporate behavior’s cultural, value, and ethical aspects and uncover the ingrained concepts behind interactions between farmers and business operators (p. 41). 1194165 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194165International SociologyReview: Economic Sociology review-article2023