The making of collectivist system in China: A case study of culture and institution formation.

摘要

The collective institution (People's Commune) was an important mechanism used by CCP to reform and control the countryside. Hence it was usually treated as an imposition pure and simple by CCP.; Base on my fieldwork conducted in a natural village (production team in the collective era) in southern Anhui Province during 1994--2001, this paper tells a story of how the collective institution came into being. Setting out from describing a social differentiation order featured in the strong individual liability, clear property boundary, and obvious hierarchy during the pre-revolutionary era, it depicts the process of how that order collapsed and peasant egalitarianism rose up during the post-revolutionary era. In the pre-revolutionary countryside, peasant egalitarianism was marginalized in the peasant culture. During the Land Reform, it emerged to the surface and entered daily activities in the guise of the new political discourses. Later on, it played an important role in the making of the new collectivism system in the background that Maoist ideology dominated Chinese political climate. In this sense, the dynamics of collectivization not only lay in the communism ideology and state force, but also derived from egalitarianism in peasant culture. And as result, the collective institution in practice showed a lot of characteristics different from the ideal model set by the state.; Not satisfied with "calculus approach" and "cultural approach" in institutional theory, this paper proposes a theoretical framework which integrates culture, structure and agency and attempts to use it to interpret the making of the collective institution.