Abstract
How rational peasants are, as opposed to their concern over justice and moral duty, is a long-standing issue of debate.1 It is no surprise that the market reform in China since 1979 has incurred similar discussions on the rational peasant.2 To what extent peasants are economically rational affects the judgment as to what motivates their seemingly social behavior. On one hand, there is the view that rational peasants continue to participate in the collective economic entity in order to avoid the risk of uncertainty generated by the arrival of the market economy.3 From the rational peasant point of view, therefore, collectivism does not explain peasant behavior. It is an outcome rather than a cause that is to be explained by peasants’ rational calculation. Collectivism is the condition of production to which peasants willingly subscribe to defend competition.
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Notes
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
For more discussion, see Daniel Little, Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
For more discussion, see Jean Oi, “Rational Choice and Attainment of Wealth and Power in the Countryside,” in Chinas Quiet Revolution: New Interactions between State and Society, ed. D. Goodman and B. Hooper, 64–79 (New York: St. Martin, 1994);
Victor Nee, “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Markets in State Socialism,” American Sociological Review 54, no. 5 (1989): 663–81.
See Tang Chou, “Back from the Brink of Revolutionary-‘Feudal’ Totalitarianism,” in State and Society in Contemporary China, ed. D. Mozingo and V. Nee, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 53–88. Also, Fong Hsiaw-chian’s “Exchange Structure and Property-Rights Patterns in Sunan and Wenzhou,” Mainland China Studies 45, no. 4 (2002, 7–8):1–13;
Chih-yu Shih, “New-institutionalism in China Studies: Reflection on Literature with a Special Attention to the English Work by Chinese Writers,” The Journal of Post-communist and Transition Studies 15, no. 2 (June 1999), 126–45.
The Issue Research Team on Helping the Poor at the Academy of Chinese (Hainan) Reform and Development, The Governance Structure of Helping the Poor in China [zhongguo fan pinkun zhili jiegou] (Beijing: Chinese Economic Press, 1998), 3; Hao Keming, “Preface,” in Facing Poverty: The Background of Educational Development in Chinas Poor Areas [miandui pinkun: zhongguo pinkun diqu jiaoyu fazhan de Beijing (Nanning: Guanxi Education Press, 1998), 2;
Peng Boming, Thought and Analysis on Economics of the Mountain Areas [shan qu jingji si bian] (Beijing: The Weather Press, 1997), 92.
This undecidability is not unlike the argument about the agency of the weak to make use of the situation or the ideology imposed upon them for their own needs, which shift across situations. See more discussion in James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985).
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© 2007 Chih-yu Shih
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Shih, Cy. (2007). Learning to Be Rational: Peasants’ Responses to Marketization in Fenghuang. In: Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609341_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609341_13
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