On the Institutional Arrangements of Farmer Cooperatives in China

In recent years, various types of farmer' s have developed rapidly in China and the government has attached certain importance to them. However, generally speaking, farmer' s in China develop at rather low level. The paper briefly describes the actualities of the overall development of farmer' s in China, analyzes the restrictive factors (fragment of land, polarization of farmers, lack of cooperative entrepreneurs, worries of the government, rural economic developing route, etc.) of the rise and development of farmer's in China and illustrates the organizational form, decision-making mechanism and benefit mechanism of farmer's in China. Influenced by the above-mentioned restrictive factors, farmer' s in China have been different from the traditional ones in rules and forms since 1990s. At least, the farmer's in the coastal districts such as Zhejiang Province, Jiangsu Province and Shanghai City show the distinctive features of the system arrangement and development trend as a new generation cooperatives .