A New Perspective for Rural Bank’s Transformation: A Case Study of Wuwei Rural Bank in China

Abstract

Rural bank played an important role in the Chinese economy. They perform financial tasks by giving microcredits to their customer and support projects aiming at reducing poverty. But in recent years, the rural bank in China haven’t finished the tasks successfully. This paper focuses on the transformation of the Wuwei rural bank in China and explore the practice logic of the transformation. With the Bourdieu’s practice theory, we plant the habitus and the symbolic capital into transformation practice. This paper benefits from a particular ethnography enriched by oral cultures and engaged observations in two years of fieldwork followed by a middle-long follow-up study. We have interviewed the residents in the Wuwei and the senior managers of the Wuwei rural bank for several times. The study examines that transformation of the rural bank is not only the business transformation but also the social transformation. Change the residents’ habitus and develop the symbolic power can make the transformation successful. These considerations are much more complicated than the traditional view of transformation but provide a new perspective in the transformation of rural banks and provide a new model for improving financial and social efficiency and reducing the poverty.

Keywords: Bourdieu; symbolic capital; habitus; rural bank; China