Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Social Connectedness in Marginal Rural China 283

However, not all households are able to exchange their labour or tools with neigh-
bours. For those with tense relations with neighbours, it was difficult for them to
join in cooperative arrangements. Instead, they had to depend on assistance from
kin or relatives.
Household communication networks also help to spread ideas and technolo-
gies. Apple plantations as a new technology, for example, often spread in those
villages where more than two households join together for tree management,
mainly to avoid sheep damage and theft of fruit. Of those villages with apple
orchards, we found that 36 per cent had two orchards (i.e. two households col-
laborating) in each village, whilst 41 per cent had more than three households
involved.
Table 15.6 shows that there is a relationship between the connectivity of house-
holds and their innovation capacity. While the scale and style of rural social com-
munication varies household by household, the results from the analysis of variance
indicate that there is a significant relation between household innovative capacity
(HIC level in the first column) and the average size of household communication
network (second column). As we have indicated, household communication net-
works comprise many components (kin, close relatives and friendly villagers).
Table 15.6 indicates a correlation between the number of friendly villagers and
household innovative capacity: the larger the number of the friendly villagers (the
third column), the higher the household’s HIC. The contribution from close rela-
tives (the right column) to the HIC is weaker. Kinship, another component of the
household communication network, is not shown as there was no statistical cor-
relation with household innovative capacity.
These findings are supported by a popular local statement: ‘Able men are those
who have more social links’ (local is called menlu). Due to the constraints arising
from remoteness and weak formal extension networks, more social connectedness
means more opportunities to access scarce resources such as information, technol-
ogy, financial capital and consultation. The HCNs, however, remain loose net-
works of social connectedness because many are held together by individual
households, and there may not be any linkages between different HCNs.
In addition to these loose HCNs that are shared by all rural households at vari-
ous scales, a variety of focused technology learning groups also appear important in

Table 15.6 Average size of household communication network by innovative capacity

HIC level No. of HCN Friendly villagers Close relatives

Low 25 7 11

Medium 31 10 13

High 34 13 14

Significance 0.016 0.003 0.268

Note: This table is derived from a one-way ANOVA analysis on the household questionnaire
survey, with households in valley villages again excluded (N = 127).