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Abstract
A movement is emerging in rural China for a new type of cooperation that is
more oriented toward democratic participation. Analytically distinguishing
these cooperatives is important for the evluation of their success as
economic enterprises and their role in building a more democratic China.
We identify them as community-based cooperatives, as opposed to other
types of cooperatives that tend to be grounded in private (“dragon head”)
enterprises or Party/State programs. The absence of reliable, consistent data
at the national level makes comparative analysis difficult across this diverse
nation. Hence, most of the work on Chinese cooperatives tends to be
provincial-level case studies. We propose a set of criteria to guide these case
studies toward comparative analysis in several dimensions: specialization,
organizational structure, substance, geographic scope, the role of elites, and
farmer/member differentiation. We briefly examine data in a case study of
Shaanxi Province in terms of these variables.