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This paper aims to determine Chinese peasant consumers' decision‐making styles.

The paper reflects on the psychological orientation and decision‐making styles of peasants' purchase of durable appliances. This has the dual character of purchase behavior by the study on factor analysis from a view of peasants' consumption psychology. The consumer style inventory (CSI) was administered in January 2009 to 5,827 peasants in 656 villages in 14 provinces which were selected randomly in China. Both an exploratory factor analysis and a confirmatory factor analysis are adopted to validate the CSI inventory. This results in a 25‐item and eight‐factor solution.

Findings indicate that three consumer segments are formed: confused by over choice peasant consumer; fashion and impulsive peasant consumer; and perfect peasant consumer. The income effect on a farmer's purchasing has a threshold, while income does not reach the limit, income does not have an obvious effect on the decision‐making styles of peasants' purchasing on durable appliances, the category of consumer styles depends on the “individual” factor of peasants' consumption psychology, and their consumption behavior characteristics depend on the grade of psychological orientation and decision‐making styles of the consumer.

The marketing mix of an enterprise should recognize the potential differences of psychology of the peasant consumer. Enterprises should adopt positive marketing strategies in pricing to induce and inspire consumer motivation and behavior, so that enterprises can positively interact with rural consumers and achieve optimal allocation of marketing resources.

This paper decribes the decision‐making styles of Chinese peasant consumers based on their purchasing behavior with regard to consumer and consumption psychology. The effect of annual average income and income source of the family on the consumers' decision‐making styles is not obvious, but the number of people in a family has some effect on consumers' decision‐making styles.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

While working on the final draft of Das Kapital Volume I, Marx discovered that the assumption that he had previously held: as it circulated capital extended its sphere of operation and at the same time absorbed earlier forms of economic organization was not supported by empirical evidence. From 1869 he began to study how in fact capital began to circulate in Russia, a country which had begun to create a capitalist economy after the liberation of the peasantry in 1861. Marx was aided in this project by Nikolai Danielson, who sent him materials on the Russian economy and who himself made a study of contemporary trends in Russian economic development. Marx contributed to the article Danielson published in 1880 on this subject. One of the works Marx acquired was the book by Vorontsov, who concurred with Danielson that only some features of capitalism were present in the Russian economy and that peasants were dispossessed without being re-deployed in capitalist enterprises. Marx died without incorporating his Russian material into the second volume of Das Kapital. Engels failed to see any problem with the circulation of capital and published the manuscripts as he found them, dispersing Marx’s Russian materials. Unlike Danielson, Engels was convinced that Russia’s economic development did not differ in any way from that of Western Europe, a conviction shared by Plekhanov and Lenin, who classed Danielson and Vorontsov as “narodniki.” Lenin’s book The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a polemic against Danielson and Vorontsov, but does not directly address the points they made.

In this chapter we focus on food sovereignty and agroecology, in the transnational peasant social movement La Via Campesina, as issues which help us analyze mechanisms of internal convergence in rural social movements. We examine such convergence through the building of collective processes, and in the construction of mobilizing frames for collective action. In particular, we analyze the encounter and diálogo de saberes (dialog among different knowledges and ways of knowing) between different rural cultures (East, West, North, and South; peasant, indigenous, and rural proletarian; etc.) that take place within it. This dialog among the “absences” left out by the dominant monoculture of ideas, has led to a process of convergence that has yielded important “emergences,” which range from mobilizing frames for collective action – like the food sovereignty concept – to social methodologies for the spread of agroecology among peasant families.

This chapter deals with the progressive political mobilisation of peasantry in Poland, its institutionalisation, mainly in inter-war period, and its political appropriation by the Communist regime after 1945, when State socialism needed to ground itself in Polish national history and political traditions. These various mobilisations could be labelled as ‘populist’ because of their peasantist components and ideological trends, but the chapter considers them rather as a political form of representation, which political uses by actors fluctuate according historical contexts. The first part analyses the emergence of peasant movement and the success of peasant political parties in pre-1939 Poland. The second part shows how formers activists of these parties tried to produce themselves as the only historical heirs of the peasant movement, in opposition to the new, Leninist, peasant party of the Communist Poland. In the third and last part, the chapter analyses how the Communist official peasant party, the ZSL, invented new political traditions, mainly by historicising strategies, in the aim to encapsulate the peasant form of representation in its identity.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the institutional evolution of China's farmland property rights deformity with its internal logic, analyze its property rights deformity and the invasions of these rights under the family operation background, and puts forward fundamental suggestions for reforming farmland property rights in China.

The concept of “public domain” raised by Barzel in 1989 is used and extended to analyze China's farmland system.

There exist five sorts of public domain and two apparent characteristics of property rights deformity: the unclear final controlling rights for some valuable attributes of goods of the “public domain”; and the “public domain” deliberately created by the government. The public domain caused by technical factors and owner's real capability are herein excluded.

China's past and present farmland system is a result of the government's compulsory system arrangements instead of market evolution. The expansion of public domains III and V has directly shrunk peasants' residual property rights. The concept of “public domain” is developed to reveal the essence of China's farmland property rights deformity.

The purposes of this paper are to explore how the cluster entrepreneurship of peasant households in the Chinese forest zone develops, and to analyze how the influence of kinship and geopolitical relations can effectively construct a mechanism for the growth of cluster entrepreneurship.

The case study method was chosen to analyze the growth process of this cluster entrepreneurship (e.g. raising chickens in Zhenghe, planting tea in Anxi and cultivating fruit in Taizhou).

The authors found that the trust, learning and driving mechanisms of cluster entrepreneurship were influenced by kinship and geopolitical relationships, and were included in the building of the growth mechanism of such cluster entrepreneurship, as has emerged. Further, in the building of this evolution mechanism, three paths of growth were found: financial support, the introduction of technology and the introduction of management.

This paper enriches the understanding of how cluster entrepreneurship develops in the socioeconomic environment of the Chinese forest zone, with particular reference to kinship and geopolitical relations, and how these contribute to the growth mechanism of cluster entrepreneurship, which is important for the management of entrepreneurial activities in that habitat.

The purpose of this research paper is a theoretical understanding of the most general trends of Russian economic development during the country's pre‐Soviet, Soviet and post‐Soviet time frames.

The objectives are designed in such a way as to include a historical aspect in the research. An attempt is made to grasp (rather cursorily) a logical internal progression in all stages of the Russian development for the last 150 years. In this, the paper shows no need for so‐called great historical personalities to explain the great historical events.

In the course of the work, it was found that Russia had experienced alternatively five different socioeconomic systems of: late mixed feudalism which was on its way to democratic mixed capitalism (the 1850s‐October 1917); state feudalism which was pregnant with authoritarian mixed capitalism (1918‐1921); authoritarian mixed capitalism in whose womb there was ripening totalitarian state capitalism (1921‐1928); totalitarian state capitalism which was carrying within itself the seeds of authoritarian state capitalism (1928‐1990); finally, authoritarian state capitalism which was moving toward authoritarian mixed capitalism (1991‐present).

The original value of the paper is in its fresh approach to the great events that have been taking place in Russia since the 1850s. The events have been analyzed not as they should be according or despite some theory but as they were and are. The paper, therefore, will be valuable to those who are interested in the socioeconomic development of Russia and who would like, one way or another, to attempt to predict the country's nearest future.

The relationship between state and peasants are reflected as the distribution of the economic benefits to each party. The purpose of this paper is to explore the essential change of the relationship from the fiscal term since the beginning of the new century.

Utilizing first‐hand survey data, this paper illustrates the changes of relationship between state and peasants by certain qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Recent positive changes in China have seen the creation of a new public finance system designed to improve equality within basic public services not only for the world's largest population but also the world's largest number of peasants. This development has produced a change in the relationship between state and peasant from “take more” to “take less.”

The sample size used in the empirical studies in this paper is relatively small. In addition, the studies focus only on the effects of relationships in the fiscal term while the social impacts are neglected.

This paper provides evidence that the recent positive changes in China have seen the building of a new public finance system, with the intention of enabling a huge number of peasants to experience equality within basic public services.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the interest conflicts and strategy evolution process of various stakeholders in the process of homestead withdrawal, to reveal which key factors can balance the interests of all parties.

The authors developed an evolutionary game theoretical framework for homestead withdrawal in Yujiang District, Jiangxi Province, China. The authors compared the dynamic process of strategy change in different situations based on system dynamics.

Compared with indirect external factors, direct economic factors, such as increasing compensation standards or increasing fines, are more likely to encourage peasants to withdraw from their homesteads. The dynamic subsidy strategy can increase the probability of peasants withdrawing from their homestead. Additionally, awarding officials with promotions can effectively encourage local governments during the process.

Previous studies have conceptualized farmers' willingness to withdraw from their homestead as a static process, ignoring the underlying dynamism. This paper analyzes the game mechanism among the stakeholders of the homestead withdrawal process from a dynamic perspective, to provide efficient suggestions regarding policymaking for homestead withdrawal.