This paper employs the concept of ‘social economy’ to reflect on the authors' experiences in rural reconstruction efforts in Mainland China, including work on peasant cooperatives and community-supported agriculture. In practice, the social and the economic can never be clearly separated. Economic problems, which may superficially appear to be independent, are in fact over-determined by all kinds of social and cultural factors, so a holistic perspective of ‘social economy’ is needed to re-embed the economic into its social context. Such a perspective can help expand the space of our practice and reflection thereon, in particular helping practitioners to understand the difficulties encountered in rural reconstruction.

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