Why the Development of Farmers' Cooperatives in China is Special

Cooperative is a kind of organizational form which is in a certain organizational environment and has certain qualitative regulations. therefore, the particularity of the development of Chinese farmers' cooperatives must come from the realistic constraints of its environment.

The first is the structural embedding based on the heterogeneity of agricultural production and management subjects. In today's China, the situation of peasant differentiation determines to a large extent the heterogeneity of rural property rights subjects. the heterogeneity of this property right subject has a profound impact on the motivation of members, property right structure, governance structure and even cultural orientation in the emergence and development of cooperatives. In other words compared with the western developed countries farmers' cooperatives in China show significant member heterogeneity in the development. The original intention of cooperatives is to deal with external vertical integration through horizontal integration within members, while cooperatives in China are not: members are not a community with homogeneous interests, and they are likely to jointly deal with external market competition at the same time, it also forms a kind of purchase and sale relationship, that is, one member earns the money of another member.

The second is the market embedding based on the situation of agricultural product supply chain management. Since the 1980s, cooperatives have been faced with the trend of agricultural vertical integration and supply chain management characterized by vertical coordination. China is different from the agricultural economic development path of industrialization (vertical integration) and then cooperation (horizontal integration), which is different from the usual path of European and American countries (first cooperation / horizontal integration, then industrialization / vertical integration). It will inevitably lead to the uniqueness of the occurrence, development goal, mode and trend of farmers' professional cooperatives in China. This market embedding dilemma also forces farmers' cooperatives in China to make timely and profound changes and innovations in strategy, organization and business in order to adapt to environmental changes. This means that the organizational attention of cooperatives must turn more and more to the market and the development of cooperatives themselves; the operation strategy of cooperatives will inevitably change from introverted to open, tend to and integrate into the supply chain; cooperatives are bound to participate in the construction of internal and external interest coordination mechanism with new rationality. To a certain extent, the vertical integration within cooperatives is a response to external vertical integration.

The third is the system embedding based on the social and political structure of our country. In recent years, governments at all levels have great expectations for the development of farmers' cooperatives, which not only helps to promote the rapid development of cooperatives, but also makes cooperatives reluctantly bear some of the economic or social functions of the government. In fact, many local governments put more emphasis on the promotion of cooperatives to their members and non-members, rather than paying attention to the normative supervision of the operation of cooperatives. This can understand why many leading enterprises participate in the cooperative operation, because they all follow the policy. To a certain extent, government departments do not cater to leading enterprises, but induce leading enterprises. Thus it can be seen that the core issue of the future development of farmers' cooperatives in China will to a large extent be transformed into the problem of how to construct a reasonable balance between cooperative autonomy and government regulation.

Finally, it is the embedding of village community based on village structure and local culture. Farmers' cooperatives in China have been rooted in the rural grass-roots level from the very beginning. However, in the traditional values and cultural norms in China's rural areas, there seems to be a lack of cultural resources that often require people to take equal relations and general trust as the greatest "moral guarantee" under the market mechanism. Moreover, the cooperative movement in the 1950s and 1960s seems to constitute more negative social memories. What's more, under the current situation that profound changes have taken place in rural communities, grass-roots organizations and their collective land resources, how to build a reasonable interactive relationship between cooperatives and community organizations, and whether the communalization of cooperatives strengthens or weakens their qualitative degree, it is one of the basic backgrounds worthy of attention in the development of farmers' cooperatives.

All this undoubtedly means that the development opportunities of farmers' cooperatives in China are much more severe, the constraints are much more complex, cooperative entrepreneurs are much more scarce, members' endowments are much more varied, and government intervention is much more frequent, which leads to the particularity of farmers' cooperatives in China compared with foreign cooperatives. If we put our farmers' cooperatives in this multi-embedded framework, the deeper the degree of embedding of cooperatives, the less like the traditional, ideal or standard cooperatives. In this sense, the development of Chinese farmers' cooperatives is bound to transcend the classics, reflect Chinese characteristics and reflect the characteristics of the times.