Cooperative Semiotics: The Changing Meaning of Alternative Modernization in China

Yuchao Yao, University of Virginia

The Cooperative is conventionally perceived as a vision of alternative economic organization to the market society already dominated by capitalist corporations. But what does cooperative mean for a society that has just begun the market transition? To what counterpart is cooperative an alternative, and how does that change across different stages of market transition? Using post-socialist China as an illustrative case, this paper investigates the changing meaning of the cooperative amidst market transition. Focusing on the emergence and transformation of China’s farmers’ cooperatives in a modeling county, I use archival and ethnographic data to trace how state actors and local peasants conceptualized the cooperative during the reform era. While the cooperative during the socialist period represented collective ownership and statist governance as an alternative to the capitalist economy, it was later reinterpreted as a morally grounded form of economic self-help capable of mitigating the social disruptions of marketization at the outset of the post-socialist transition. In this process, the cooperative was variously perceived as an economic alternative to the urban model of large-scale production, an administrative alternative to the rural governmental organization dominated by local party cadres, or a socio-political alternative to the contentious negotiation between peasants and the state, contrasting the contemporaneous right protection events. This semiotic turn was enabled by the interaction between local peasants, indigenous intellectuals, state officials, and international networks. The exchange between understanding the cooperative as an organization of production, distribution, governance, or democracy once created room for debate, although the state’s recent inclination to production-emphasized agricultural modernization has almost closed the symbolic potential of other views. Taking the cooperative as a moralized economic phenomenon, this study engages with the existing literature by reexamining one classic focus of moral economy— peasantry —in a case where moralization has changed in the lack of confrontational social movement.

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 Presented in Session 117. Morality in Economic and Political Transformations