There are several reason for this sense of helplessness among the peasantry, including the market economy’s disruption of the peasant economy, the irresponsibility of local governments, and peasants’ lack of social capital, but the fundamental reason is the disorganization of rural society. Rural society today lacks cohesion, “like a sheet of loose sand.” Disorganized peasant households, depending on individual strength alone, cannot overcome natural hardships, nor can they face the challenges of the market or encroachments on their interests, and their self-confidence inevitably declines. The source of peasants’ spiritual poverty, therefore, is their lack of their own organization(s), and their loss of collective solicitude. At the same time, urban culture promoting individual competitiveness and interpersonal alienation has flooded into the countryside, further affecting rural culture and worsening peasants’ spiritual poverty.

Comrade Liu Xiangbo (刘相波), better known as Liu Laoshi (刘老石), was the program coordinator of the Center for Rural Reconstruction at Renmin University of China, Ph.D. student at Renmin University’s School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, and founding director of the Liang Shuming Center for Rural Reconstruction. He passed away at 9:45 PM on March 24, at the age of 43, in the hospital of the Tianjin Armed Police Medical School, due to injuries from a traffic accident.

Food magazine Zester has just published a report and slideshow about the Anlong co-op by award-winning journalists Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman. Even if you’ve read my reports I recommend you check this out, since their experience with food and farming attuned their eyes to details that I missed, and needless to say their writing and photography are far superior.

This summer, the Southern China Rural Studies Center of Sun Yat-sen University, in collaboration with the Social Work Research Center of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Beijing University, hosted the second of a series of workshops on “social work” in China, called “Advanced Workshops on Harmonizing Urban and Rural Development.” This workshop focused on rural cooperative organization.

Report on the struggle of Guixi Co-op workers in Chengdu against the cooperative equivalent to a management buyout. Reflections on the use of homicide - or the threat of homicide - as a weapon of the weak over the past few years in China.