The Changes of Peasants' Class Identity and Fate in the Past 50 Years since the Founding of New China.

Since the reform and opening up, the peasant class is rapidly disintegrating. Many people have been engaged in non-agricultural industries such as industry and commerce for a long time, and many farmers have become entrepreneurs, scientific and technological workers, urban self-employed workers and professional workers who make a living by selling technology. No matter how farmers evolve and how the labor force expands or contracts, the contradiction between workers and farmers still exists. (1) The main manifestation of the contradiction between workers and peasants is 1. Politically, due to the unsynchronized process of urban and rural democratic political construction, scattered farmers' residence, difficult management and uneven quality of cadres, some new contradictions have arisen. (1) The farmers' increasingly strong demand for equality has formed a sharp contradiction with the corrupt style of some party and government organs and cadres. Some party and government organs and cadres abuse power for personal gain and oppress the people, and farmers hate these corrupt phenomena; (2) Since the reform and opening up, farmers' democratic awareness and policy concepts have been generally enhanced. However, some leading organs and leading cadres are seriously bureaucratic and do not listen to the opinions of the masses, causing strong dissatisfaction among farmers; (3) The contradiction between farmers' need to live and work in peace and contentment and the serious out-of-control social security. In recent years, the disorder of rural public security has made farmers lose their sense of stability and security. They all hate rampant criminals and deeply blame the state for its poor punishment.

During the period of people's commune, the planned economy and political struggle constructed highly homogeneous "members" in rural areas of China. At that time, in a production team and a production brigade, hundreds of people basically lived in the same house, wore roughly the same clothes (even the colors were only gray, black and military green) and ate roughly the same amount of food.

So, in China at that time, hundreds of millions of peasants actually became a class, and all of them could be called people's commune members. Since the reform, with the development of market economy, farmers in China have been rapidly divided. The biggest change since the reform is the farmers in the traditional sense. In view of this, some scholars put forward the problem of re-understanding farmers.

Why have farmers been divided since the reform? Academic circles have conducted in-depth discussions on this. Some scholars have discussed the internal causes of farmers' differentiation, and believe that the contradiction between man and land is the most fundamental cause of rural occupational differentiation. Traditional handicraft industry in rural areas is the social and historical basis of occupational differentiation; The quality of rural labor force suitable for changing jobs is the condition for the professional differentiation of labor force itself. Some scholars believe that the internal cause of farmers' differentiation existed long before the reform, and the main reason for farmers' differentiation after the reform lies in the reform and opening-up policy, mainly the loosening of the household contract responsibility system and household registration system, which "liberated" farmers. Some scholars have noticed that farmers' differentiation has occurred under the background of rapid economic and social changes since the reform, and the factors affecting farmers' differentiation have deeper economic and social development background, such as changes in ownership structure, industrial structure and economic and political system reform. Some scholars believe that the social transformation and institutional changes promoted by reform and opening up have provided impetus for farmers' differentiation.

Since the reform, great differentiation has taken place among farmers in China, which is generally acknowledged, but there is no clear definition of what is "farmer differentiation" in academic circles. Generally speaking, farmers' differentiation includes occupational differentiation, income differentiation, power differentiation, prestige differentiation and class differentiation, among which occupational differentiation and income differentiation constitute the basis of farmers' differentiation. For example, the eight classes of farmers recognized by most scholars, namely, agricultural labourers, migrant workers, employees, peasant intellectuals, self-employed, private entrepreneurs, managers of township enterprises and rural managers, are grouped on the basis of occupation with reference to the way of using the means of production and the variables such as power and income of the means of production used.

The most significant consequence of farmers' differentiation is the differentiation of farmers' income, which is very average. A number of surveys show that the Gini coefficient of farmers' income distribution continues to rise and has entered the stage of big gap. According to some scholars' calculations based on the data of the Agricultural Transfer Corps of the National Bureau of Statistics, the Gini coefficient of farmers' income in China is 0.24 1978, 0.26 1984, 0.33 1990, and the Gini coefficient rises linearly. Another scholar pointed out that the Gini coefficient of per capita income of rural families in China rose to 0.4 1 1 in/996, which has obviously exceeded the reasonable critical point. In just a few decades, China has changed from a country where egalitarianism prevails to a country with moderate international inequality.

It should be pointed out that the occupational differentiation of farmers in contemporary China is completely different from the class differentiation of farmers in old China, which is an inevitable phenomenon in the development of socialist market economy. However, the continuous differentiation of farmers has created a continuous tension with the current rural social management system, especially posing a severe challenge to the rural tax and fee system.