Week 4 (24th, Feb - 2rd, Mar 2014)

• Work Finished

1. Doing survey in Nanhuatang Town and Bailang Town in Yun County from 23rd to 27th.

This city is in the mountain area. Livestock breeding is relatively more developed than crop planting in the towns we visit, so we select four breeding coops to do the survey. In Nanhuatang, we visit an egg-laying chicken breeding coop and a meat goats breeding coop. In Bailang, we visit an egg-laying chicken breeding coop and a bigs breeding coop. Most of our time was spent on the chicken breeding coops, which were stabilised earlier and develop relatively better.

• Work to Do

1. Doing survey in Lankao County and Shangqiu County in Henan Prov.

• Questions

1. It is quite difficult to obtain the longitudinal data that can reflect the change from smallholders to largeholders and to coops at both household and community level. The time span would be 10-20years.  Instead, can I use two sets of short-range longitudinal data? One reflects the change from smallholders to largeholders, the other reflects the change from largeholders to coops.  The two datasets are separated. The time span of each dataset would be 5-10 years.

2. A large percentage of the young workers (btw 20-45 year) work in the cities and become the migrant workers. Some of them come back to the villages to offer some help in the busy season (a few weeks in a year). The young workers that stay in the villages are generally those who are village leaders or run factories, agri companies or coops. The remaining workers earn at least as much as the migrant workers earn every year. Otherwise they have been working in the cities as well. Some migrant workers come back to work in the villages as they find some programmes that earn no less than working in the cities as they have more money and social relations. The decisions are usually made during their Chinese New Year holiday.

This largely increases the difficulty to compare the social capital and entrepreneurship among the households. The migrant workers might or might not have higher social capital or entrepreneurship than the largeholders or the coop members. If we just consider the households staying in the villages, our conclusion would be quite obvious as only the rural elites (coop leaders, village leaders and so on) and the “weak” villages (children and the old) stay. A good solution is to find the villages in which only a small amount of the young labours work in the cities. I doubt this is quite difficult as 2/3 rural labour are employed in the cities in China. Considering the requirement of longitudinal data this would be more or less impossible.