Developing Farmers' Professional Cooperatives to Help Targeted Poverty Alleviation

1. Raising the Problem

Since the reform and opening up, the large-scale poverty alleviation and development work carried out by the Chinese government has achieved remarkable successes that have attracted worldwide attention, lifting more than 700 million rural poor people out of poverty and accumulating rich experience in poverty alleviation. However, up to now, China still has more than 70 million rural poor people, distributed in a "scattered" pattern across vast rural areas, and the task of helping this group escape poverty and become prosperous remains arduous. In November 2013, when General Secretary Xi Jinping inspected Xiangxi, he proposed that "poverty alleviation must be realistic and suited to local conditions. It is necessary to carry out targeted poverty alleviation, and we must absolutely avoid empty slogans, and must not set unreachable goals." As a result, the Chinese government began to vigorously promote targeted poverty alleviation work. The 13th Five-Year Plan pointed out that by 2020, rural poor people under China's current standards will be lifted out of poverty, which set clear requirements for rural poverty alleviation work in the new period. How to build a long-term mechanism for rural poor people to escape poverty and become prosperous through innovation in the systems and mechanisms of targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication, win the battle against poverty, and safeguard the basic right of poor people to share in the fruits of economic development has become an economic and social issue to which the Party and the government attach great importance.

Farmers' cooperatives are mutual-aid economic organizations formed by the union of disadvantaged groups. Their institutional arrangements naturally have the organizational characteristic of being pro-poor, and they are an ideal vehicle for rural poor people to escape poverty under market economy conditions (Wu Bin, Xu Xuchu, 2009). They are also regarded as the most efficient economic organizations for anti-poverty efforts (Wu Dingyu, 2000). By the end of October 2015, the number of farmers' cooperatives nationwide reached 1.479 million. Although farmers' cooperatives in poor areas can promote the income growth of farming households, the income growth of members shows significant differences: members with high per capita assets see notable income increases, while the interests of poor farming households cannot be reliably guaranteed (Hu Lian, 2014). Farmers' cooperatives deviating from the pro-poor organizational purpose in their development is not only unfavorable for building property rights systems and governance structures that conform to current laws and the cooperative principles stipulated by the International Co-operative Alliance, but also leaves cooperatives subject to widespread criticism and doubt, seriously affecting the social reputation of Chinese farmers' cooperatives. Therefore, how to innovate cooperative development mechanisms, effectively safeguard the cooperative rights and interests of disadvantaged farming households, fully leverage the organizational advantages of more than 1 million cooperatives, and make cooperatives truly become organizational vehicles for targeted poverty alleviation and rural anti-poverty efforts is a major practical issue urgently needing resolution at the current stage for the transformation, upgrading, and sustainable development of Chinese farmers' cooperatives.

Based on this, we find that targeted poverty alleviation and the development of farmers' cooperatives share consistency of goals. At the same time, the poverty alleviation function of farmers' cooperatives is also being explored by the government. For example, Guizhou Province proposed during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period to build 1,000 comprehensive cooperatives, drive the development of 10,000 farmers' cooperatives, and help 400,000-500,000 poor people escape poverty and become prosperous (Wang Yifan, Li Ping, 2016). Therefore, building an institutional mechanism for coordinated innovation between farmers' cooperative development and targeted poverty alleviation requires, on the one hand, giving play to the positive role of cooperatives in targeted poverty alleviation so that poor people can truly and permanently escape poverty by relying on cooperatives, and on the other hand, enabling cooperatives to further expand development space through the implementation of the national strategy of targeted poverty alleviation and promote the standardized development of cooperative organizations. This constitutes the core topic of this article.

2. The Theoretical Logic of Building a Coordinated Development Mechanism Between Cooperatives and Targeted Poverty Alleviation

This article holds that there is an inherent theoretical self-consistency between the development of farmers' cooperatives and targeted poverty alleviation, making it suitable to build an institutional mechanism for coordinated innovation. This can be analyzed starting from the practical dilemmas currently faced by both:

Even before the promulgation of the Cooperative Law, the academic community had already paid attention to the alienation of farmers' cooperative economic organizations (Ying Ruiyao, 2002). After the implementation of the Cooperative Law, the phenomenon of deviation between the institutional expression and institutional practice of farmers' cooperatives not only failed to be fundamentally alleviated, but continued to intensify, even showing a trend of transformation from a "cooperative system" to a "membership system" (Zhao Xiaofeng, 2015). It can be seen from this that the challenges facing the standardized development of farmers' cooperatives have long existed and have a deep economic and social foundation. As mutual-aid economic organizations built on the basis of the "union of persons," institutional non-standardization naturally cannot be separated from human factors, and member heterogeneity has become a focal issue of concern for academia and policy research departments. The obvious differences in resource endowments among cooperative members easily form a heterogeneous membership structure, thereby directly affecting the cooperative's property rights system. Huang Shengzhong and others (2008), in a survey of 168 cooperatives in Zhejiang Province, found that the equity structure of cooperatives is relatively concentrated, with the average shareholding ratio of the largest shareholder at 20%, and the shareholding ratio of the top ten shareholders as high as about 60%. These major shareholders control the cooperative's property ownership, become core members of the cooperative, and then in the evolution of the cooperative system build a governance structure favorable to themselves, controlling the main residual control rights and claim rights of the cooperative, so that the distribution of cooperative surplus inevitably mainly follows distribution by shares, supplemented by distribution according to transaction volume (Lin Jian, Huang Shengzhong, 2007). Moreover, the initial stratification phenomenon between a small number of core members and the majority of ordinary members will further generalize and solidify in the subsequent development of the cooperative. Member stratification will form an unequal power structure, causing resource factors to gather from lower-level members to upper-level members, while the returns on resource factors flow from top to bottom as members at each level peel off the factor returns corresponding to their level. In the absence of external stimuli, the top-down peeling-off distribution of cooperative interests will create a new round of differences in resource endowments among members at each level, gradually causing lower-level members to rely on inherent factors to participate in cooperation while upper-level members move toward multi-factor cooperation (He Anhua et al., 2012). This development trend of cooperatives will have a sustained impact on the innovation and change of the cooperative system, further concentrating the main power of cooperative organizations in core members, thereby causing ordinary members' ability to obtain returns within the organization to decline rather than rise.

It can thus be seen that ordinary members not holding shares or holding too low a proportion of shares is the main reason for the unreasonable property rights system of cooperatives, and is also the fundamental reason for the alienation of cooperative governance structures. In addition, ordinary members giving up shareholding will also reduce the cooperative's ability to gather capital and resources, leaving cooperatives facing strong financing difficulties, affecting the exertion of the cooperative organization's economies of scale, and being unfavorable for cooperatives to extend the cooperative industrial chain and tap cooperative business space. The choices of ordinary members stem, on the one hand, from their lack of willingness to hold shares, and on the other hand, from their disadvantaged position in the differentiated rural social class structure. If the heterogeneity of resource endowments among members is the key variable in the alienation of the cooperative system, then the increasingly differentiated rural social class structure after reform and opening up is the internal cause of differences in member endowments. Members with different identities occupy different social classes in village society, and their cooperative needs, willingness, and capacity for action differ greatly, so their attitudes toward cooperatives naturally also differ. For poor farming households, apart from government policy-guaranteed income such as the minimum living allowance, their family economic income mainly depends on agricultural operating income. Therefore, in principle they have a relatively strong willingness to cooperate. However, they lack the necessary funds for shareholding, or are excluded by the threshold of cooperatives, or join the cooperative without holding shares. Because they do not hold shares, they cannot truly become members of the cooperative (Pan Jin, 2011), let alone have a sense of ownership in the cooperative. This constitutes the internal reason why cooperatives deviate from the pro-poor nature of the system, and is also the greatest challenge facing the standardized development of cooperatives.

At the same time, academic research has found that, as the main method of future rural poverty alleviation in China, targeted poverty alleviation is a targeted measure adopted to offset the decline in the poverty-reduction effect of economic growth (Wang Sangui, Guo Zihao, 2015). Targeted poverty alleviation is accompanied by the allocation of huge national fiscal resources. In essence, it is the government's redistribution of interests through its role in resource regulation, and it is an essential requirement of improving people's livelihood, achieving common prosperity, and building socialism. However, for a long time, the efficiency of using poverty alleviation resources has not been high, and targeted poverty alleviation also faces multiple dilemmas in practice. On the one hand, it is increasingly difficult to identify poor villages and poor farming households. Research by Wang Sangui and others (2007) found that 48% of villages that should have been designated as poor villages were not targeted. At the same time, in 2001, 59% of poor people lived in poor villages, and by 2004 this proportion had dropped to 51%; in terms of poverty alleviation targeting, targeted poverty alleviation faces dual challenges from institutions and policies (Tang Lixia et al., 2015). On the other hand, in the process of fiscal poverty alleviation resources going to the countryside, there exists the phenomenon of elite capture, with a considerable proportion of the state's poverty alleviation resources enjoyed by prosperous farming households, while truly poor farming households are deprived of the qualification to share resources (Xing Chengju, Li Xiaoyun, 2013). In addition, targeted poverty alleviation also faces the problems of scale exclusion under poverty scale control and insufficient means of poverty alleviation and development against the background of marketization (Zuo Ting et al., 2015). Targeted poverty alleviation cannot form effective participation by poor households, nor can it overcome the problem of limited poverty alleviation resources (Ge Zhijun, Xing Chengju, 2015). There is also significant exclusion of poor households in targeted poverty alleviation (Deng Weijie, 2014). Social organizations in poor areas develop slowly, and the benefits of social poverty alleviation are limited (Huang Chengwei, Qin Zhimin, 2015). Under the targeted poverty alleviation mechanism, it is still impossible to systematically attend to the sustainable livelihoods of poor households, impossible to solve the problem of left-behind populations (Wang Xiaoyi, 2015), and difficult to solve the problem of information asymmetry between poverty alleviation subjects and objects in existing poverty alleviation work. Therefore, targeted poverty alleviation is precisely about improving the efficiency of using fiscal poverty alleviation resources, using limited poverty alleviation funds where they are most needed, fully giving play to the role of market mechanisms in poverty alleviation work, and moreover strengthening the protection of the rights of poor households. The current governance model of poverty alleviation in China is a combination of market-based developmental governance and rights-based protective governance (Li Xiaoyun, 2013). Therefore, targeted poverty alleviation must solve the difficult questions of "whom to support," "who will support them," and "how to support them."

According to the traditional poverty alleviation model, poverty alleviation resources are transmitted downward in the form of project systems. Even if the phenomenon of loss at each level can be avoided, they will still encounter the problem of low efficiency caused by targeting deviation at the county, township, and village levels. In current Chinese county-level society, local governments, enterprises, rural capable persons, and rural marginal forces such as thugs have become multiple interest subjects straddling the state and farmers. Through long-term interaction and gaming, they gradually coalesce and form an increasingly stable relationship network, and have spawned a structural force capable of distorting rural policies and hindering the adjustment of state-farmer relations (Zhao Xiaofeng, Fu Shaoping, 2015). Not only project-based resources, but even the minimum living allowance policy directly connected to poor farming households is difficult to implement fundamentally, and phenomena such as "relationship-based guarantees" and "stability-maintenance guarantees" occur in large numbers (Wei Chenglin, 2013). Therefore, to improve the efficiency of using poverty alleviation resources, it is necessary to innovate institutions and mechanisms. The "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Winning the Battle Against Poverty" pointed out that targeted poverty alleviation must strengthen government responsibility, guide the market and society to make coordinated efforts, and build a broad poverty alleviation pattern in which special poverty alleviation, industry poverty alleviation, and social poverty alleviation complement one another. The participation of farmers' cooperatives in targeted poverty alleviation is an important component of social poverty alleviation and an inherent requirement of building a grand social poverty alleviation strategy (State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, 2012). As an economic phenomenon and organizational behavior, farmers' cooperatives expand their autonomous space for development by embedding themselves in village society. On the one hand, they have close ties with farmers and were originally autonomous self-governing organizations formed by the union of disadvantaged farming households; on the other hand, they constitute a third party outside the government and poor farming households, and can become intermediary organizations between the state and farmers. If village committees under government leadership undertake the task of identifying poor households and solving the problem of "whom to support"; farmers' cooperatives undertake the role of support providers and resolve the difficult problem of "who will support them"; and cooperatives solve the problem of "how to support them" through industrial projects, technical training, financial cooperation, and so on, then a new poverty alleviation pattern with clear division of labor and assigned responsibilities can be built.

Therefore, if national fiscal poverty alleviation resources can be directly connected to cooperatives and the poverty alleviation funds and resources precisely connected to farming households can be quantified as the equity of poor farming households in cooperatives, while fully safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of poor farming households in cooperatives, this will bring about the practical effect of coordinated development and win-win cooperation for both sides. This constitutes the theoretical logic of institutional innovation for the coordinated development of farmers' cooperatives and targeted poverty alleviation. Of course, it should be noted that the national fiscal poverty alleviation resources proposed here are in a broad sense, not fiscal special poverty alleviation resources in a narrow sense, but include, for example, resources for agricultural industrialization projects, resources for projects to cultivate new types of agricultural operating entities, and resources for agricultural science and technology innovation projects. Projects that promote rural development and increase farmers' incomes should be tilted toward farmers' cooperatives that actively assume social poverty alleviation responsibilities.

3. The Role Positioning and Functional Mechanisms of Cooperatives in Targeted Poverty Alleviation

By the end of October 2015, farmers' cooperatives had absorbed 99.97 million farming households, covering 41.7% of farming households nationwide, becoming an important organizational vehicle for scattered farming households to unite in meeting market challenges. Theoretically speaking, first, farmers' cooperatives, based on the organizational logic and operational logic of acquaintance society, can solve the problem of "whom to support," thereby improving the efficiency of identifying and targeting poor people; second, by undertaking national poverty alleviation resources and absorbing the own resources and capital of poor farming households, farmers' cooperatives carry out social poverty alleviation and, by solving the difficult problem of "who will support them," can both promote the sustainable development of cooperative organizations and, to a certain extent, overcome the dilemma of limited fiscal poverty alleviation resources while helping the government achieve the goal of targeted poverty alleviation. Therefore, the role of cooperatives in targeted poverty alleviation should be positioned as intermediary organizations, playing the role of intermediate carriers organically linking the state and farmers. Next, this article will focus on analyzing the functional mechanisms of cooperatives in targeted poverty alleviation and exploring the practical mechanisms of "how to support them," in order to promote the exertion of the key role functions of cooperatives.

First, help poor farming households escape poverty through the development of characteristic industries. Developing characteristic industries in poor areas is the main lever for helping poor farming households escape poverty and become prosperous. As mutual-aid economic organizations voluntarily united and democratically managed by operators producing the same type of agricultural products or providers and users of services for the same type of agricultural production and operation, farmers' cooperatives are an important organizational platform that governments in poor areas can rely on to develop characteristic industries. However, at the current stage, the relationship between farmers' cooperatives and poor farming households is too loose. Many cooperatives set a certain transaction amount or share amount as the threshold for farmers to join at the very beginning of their establishment, thereby excluding a considerable number of ordinary farming households from cooperative organizations. In the process of development, these cooperatives will not only fail to lower the threshold, but will also exclude more farming households willing to cooperate by raising the threshold or closing the channels for joining. These farming households have no choice but to conduct transactions with cooperatives, yet cannot enjoy the cooperative rights of returns according to transaction volume, and are indirectly squeezed by the cooperatives' profits (Zhao Xiaofeng, 2015). Therefore, the government should encourage farmers' cooperatives to actively absorb poor farming households, strengthen the interest linkage mechanism between cooperatives and poor farming households, and pay more attention to giving play to the organizational and driving role of farmers' cooperatives for the rural poor. To this end, the central and local governments should coordinate the use of national fiscal resources: on the one hand, connect special funds for industrial poverty alleviation and development and targeted poverty alleviation projects to farmers' cooperatives, and select cooperatives that absorb a relatively large number of poor farming households and have notable effects in helping poor farming households escape poverty sustainably as key targets of support; on the other hand, combine special funds supporting cooperative development with the governance goals of targeted poverty alleviation, encourage cooperatives to lower thresholds, assume the social responsibility of helping poor farming households, absorb poor farming households into cooperatives, and achieve market-oriented governance of poverty through organized vehicles. At the same time, the government can also set standards for cooperatives applying for projects, urge cooperatives to establish and improve internal governance structures and management mechanisms, and fully safeguard the cooperative rights and interests of poor farming households who join.

Second, rely on cooperatives to explore new paths for asset-based income poverty alleviation. As more and more poor farming households escape poverty, it will become increasingly difficult for those still poor to escape poverty. Therefore, against the background of the state's vigorous implementation of the poverty alleviation strategy, exploring new paths for asset-based income poverty alleviation has become an important measure for building a long-term mechanism for targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication. From the actual situation, there are mainly three methods for exploring asset-based income poverty alleviation: first, quantify all or part of the national fiscal special funds and other agriculture-related funds invested in cooperatives to identified poor farming households, record them in member accounts as share funds for poor farming households to join the cooperative, and at the same time stipulate that the relevant assets are entrusted to the cooperative for unified operation, with the cooperative bearing responsibility for preserving and increasing the value of the relevant assets, and poor farming households only enjoying the income generated by the assets and not being allowed to withdraw shares or capital. Second, encourage cooperatives to actively assume the responsibility of social poverty alleviation, take out income generated by past fiscal funds or their own funds, and in forms such as allocated shares or donated shares establish files and cards for poor farming households joining the cooperative, set up asset accounts, and ensure their right to obtain corresponding asset income. Third, encourage poor farming households who have lost labor capacity and have low farming efficiency to entrust, transfer, or contribute their land as shares to cooperatives for unified operation, explore the mechanism for market entry of collective operating construction land in poor villages, and have cooperatives be responsible for distributing corresponding asset income to farming households annually or monthly, driving poor farming households to increase income. Overall, this is about integrating national poverty alleviation resources and the existing assets of poor farming households through cooperatives to serve the implementation of the asset-based income poverty alleviation strategy, and on the basis of ensuring that poor farming households basically escape poverty, gradually establish a long-term mechanism for asset-based income poverty alleviation and for helping poor farming households better improve their livelihoods.

Third, develop credit cooperation and implement financial poverty alleviation. Internal credit cooperation carried out by farmers' cooperatives has become the main form of new cooperative finance development in rural China today (Wang Shuguang, 2014). Therefore, cooperative credit cooperation should become a key measure for the government to intensify financial poverty alleviation during the 13th Five-Year Plan period. Government support for cooperatives to carry out credit cooperation can draw on the innovative experience of poverty alleviation mutual-aid societies to add shares for poor farming households. In 2005, the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development began exploring the development of mutual-aid fund societies in Yilong County, Sichuan Province, advancing the pilot for poverty alleviation and development and building a socialist harmonious society. In the pilot, the determination of poor households was made through mass appraisal, and the government established poverty alleviation mutual-aid funds according to the method of "giving shares to poor households, allocating shares for ordinary households, and having prosperous households purchase shares," at 1,000 yuan per share (Lin Wanlong et al., 2008). In developing cooperative credit cooperation, the government can also help poor farming households establish a certain amount of equity in cooperatives by giving them shares, so that they can both obtain the basic right to borrow from the cooperative and obtain dividend income from the corresponding equity. At the same time, when granting loans to poor households, cooperatives should also provide certain assistance by reducing or waiving interest. When the Puhan Farmers' Planting Professional Cooperative Union in Yongji City, Shanxi Province, developed credit cooperation, it established an assistance system giving priority to poor members, implementing tiered differential interest rates within the organization: loans of 20,000-30,000 yuan charged a monthly interest of 1.5 fen, 10,000-20,000 yuan charged a monthly interest of 1.3 fen, 5,000-10,000 yuan charged a monthly interest of 0.8 fen, 2,000-5,000 yuan charged a monthly interest of 0.5 fen, and amounts below 2,000 yuan with a term not exceeding 3 months were exempt from monthly interest (Wang Xiaolu, Jiang Sidong, 2015).

Fourth, promote agricultural technology and achieve poverty alleviation through science and technology. For scattered farming households, agricultural technology is a kind of information input from outside to inside, and its speed of dissemination differs among farming households with different economic income levels. The "knowledge gap" hypothesis in communication studies holds that, as the information disseminated to society by mass media continuously increases, people in different economic and social positions acquire new knowledge at different speeds, and people with lower economic and social status often acquire such information much more slowly than people with higher economic and social status (Tichenor, Donohue & Olien, 1970). This phenomenon also exists in the process of agricultural technology entering villages and households. Because people with higher economic and social status are basically elites in rural society, they have more channels for obtaining information than poor farming households. Rural elites obtain agricultural technology information mainly by relying on external channels such as experts, dealers, television, newspapers, and the internet, while poor farming households basically rely on relational transmission among acquaintances within the village, which belongs to secondary transmission in village society (Zhang Hong, 2013). Therefore, the natural dissemination of agricultural technology is more favorable to rural elites and easily intensifies the differentiation of farming households. However, farmers' cooperatives can, through unified provision of seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, technical guidance, and other integrated farmland cultivation standards, change members' heterogeneous use of agricultural technology, improve the efficiency with which poor farming households use agricultural technology, raise household economic income levels, and improve their living welfare and production skills. In addition, traditional agricultural technology extension relying on the government system cannot bear the transaction costs of connecting with the scientific and technological needs of scattered small farmers, but farmers' cooperatives are important vehicles and low-cost platforms for connecting with and disseminating agricultural science and technology. Therefore, by relying on farmers' cooperatives, the government can better implement science and technology poverty alleviation projects and increase the contribution of science and technology to poor farming households' escape from poverty and attainment of prosperity.

4. New Opportunities That Targeted Poverty Alleviation Provides for the Standardized Development of Farmers' Cooperatives

Farmers' cooperatives can promote the realization of the goals of targeted poverty alleviation. At the same time, targeted poverty alleviation also provides new opportunities for the standardized development of farmers' cooperatives.

First, it is conducive to enriching cooperative capital, promoting cooperative organizations to expand the scale of cooperation, and extending the industrial chain. On the basis of the household contract responsibility system, vigorously developing farmers' cooperatives is intended to better give play to the comprehensive advantages of cooperatives' economies of scale and resource-gathering effects, obtain cooperative returns that scattered farming households do not have, and strive for more economic returns for farming households participating in cooperation. In the industrial chain of agricultural products, the profits of the production link are often difficult to fundamentally guarantee. In 1999, the profits obtained by farmers as producers accounted for 56% of the total profits obtained in all links of agricultural products, and by 2010 this had dropped to 43%. If the cost of farmers' "self-employment" is deducted, from the perspective of net profit, from 1999 to 2000, farmers' actual profit share had already dropped from 29% to 20% (Wu Guanghan, 2012). Therefore, by building an institutional mechanism for coordinated innovation between targeted poverty alleviation and cooperative development, poor farming households can join cooperatives and hold equity in them, while the capital strength of cooperatives and the land, labor, and other resources they can mobilize are also raised to a certain extent. On the one hand, this can gather the scattered strength of more farming households, expand the combined scale in the production link, and further highlight the advantages of economies of scale; on the other hand, it can extend the field of cooperation to the circulation link, and even directly connect with supermarkets and face consumers directly, thereby retaining the profits of the circulation link within the cooperative organization. At the same time, cooperatives can also rely on more substantial capital strength to provide farming households with unified purchasing and distributed sales services for means of production and means of livelihood, helping farming households joining the cooperative reduce production and living costs.

Second, it is conducive to safeguarding the cooperative rights of poor farming households, enhancing their capacity for cooperative self-governance, and promoting cooperatives to build scientific and reasonable property rights systems and governance structures. Poverty alleviation is not only economic bottom-line poverty alleviation, but also relief of basic rights. Injecting national fiscal special funds into cooperatives and quantifying them as share funds for poor farming households joining the cooperative, converting them into equity held by them, is conducive to promoting cooperatives to improve their capital structure, establish a more reasonable property rights system, and closely link the interests of cooperatives and poor farming households. At the same time, although this portion of share funds is held by poor farming households, it cannot be freely withdrawn, and they can only enjoy protected rights to preserve and increase value. As a result, the interests of poor farming households are bound together with the long-term development of the cooperative, which can mobilize their enthusiasm to participate in cooperation and continuously enhance their capacity for cooperative self-governance in the process of participation, thereby achieving the goals of rights relief and rights-based poverty alleviation. The continuous growth of poor farming households' rights in cooperatives helps enhance their ability to consult and negotiate with cooperative management, increases their voice, and further helps promote cooperatives to build scientific, reasonable governance structures that conform to current legal provisions, so as to change their disadvantaged position in cooperatives and ensure that they have basic claim rights and distribution rights over cooperative surplus. Therefore, the implementation of the targeted poverty alleviation strategy not only helps increase the share fund proportion of poor farming households in cooperatives and improve the equity structure of cooperatives, but also helps enhance the cooperative self-governance capacity of poor farming households, improve the human capital of cooperative organizations, and promote cooperatives to establish more reasonable and effective governance structures.

Third, it is conducive to enhancing poor farming households' trust in cooperatives, enabling cooperative organizations to win reputation in rural communities, and promoting the transformation and upgrading of cooperatives. Trust is the foundation of cooperation. The higher the degree of social trust, the lower the transaction cost of cooperation among villagers and the higher the cooperation efficiency, and the more favorable it is to the survival and development of farmers' cooperatives (Xu Zhigang, Zhang Sen et al., 2011). However, research by Zhao Quanmin and Li Yi (2007) points out that Chinese farmers' trust is "acquaintance trust" with a "circle-oriented spirit" based on kinship and quasi-kinship relations. This constitutes the basic action logic by which they move toward cooperation and has an important impact on the development of rural cooperative economic organizations: on the one hand, it can prompt individual farmers to move toward cooperation when meeting market challenges and promote the establishment and development of cooperative economic organizations; on the other hand, it also limits the increase of cooperation partners and the expansion of cooperation scale, thereby having a restrictive effect on cooperative economic organizations' expansion toward larger scale and broader geographical space. However, if cooperatives can fulfill the social responsibility of targeted poverty alleviation, the leaders of cooperatives can gradually break free from the influence of kinship and quasi-kinship relations, win the trust of more farmers outside the circle, and continuously attract non-circle farmers into cooperatives, expanding the scale of cooperative membership. In this process, cooperatives embedded in village society can also win social reputation, change people's one-sided understanding of cooperatives, increase visibility, enable cooperatives to continuously accumulate social capital stock, and lay the social foundation for transformation, upgrading, and sustainable development.

5. Conclusion and Discussion

In summary, the organizational characteristic of institutional pro-poorness gives farmers' cooperatives and targeted poverty alleviation inherent theoretical self-consistency, providing basic conditions for building a coordinated mechanism between the two, enabling cooperatives to play the role of intermediary organizations between the state and poor farming households. On the one hand, they become the organizational vehicle for the government to carry out targeted poverty alleviation, solve the difficult problems of "who will support them" and "how to support them," improve the efficiency of using national fiscal poverty alleviation resources, and improve the family livelihoods of poor farming households; on the other hand, they also enable themselves to enrich capital strength, improve property rights structures, establish a closer interest linkage mechanism with poor farming households, enhance their capacity for cooperative self-governance, and further improve the governance structure and management mechanisms of cooperatives, creating opportunities for the transformation, upgrading, and sustainable development of cooperatives. Through the building of a coordinated mechanism between the two sides, cooperatives will assume the social responsibility of targeted poverty alleviation and better give play to their pro-poor organizational function. This is conducive to enhancing members' trust in cooperatives, helping cooperatives win social reputation in rural communities, and creating a favorable political and social environment for cooperative development.

However, while promoting the building of a coordinated mechanism between cooperative development and targeted poverty alleviation, the government also needs to give play to its due responsibilities of guidance, management, and supervision: first, assign the difficult task of identifying poor farming households to village committees or other social organizations, separate the responsibilities of "whom to support" and "how to support them," and clarify powers and responsibilities; second, improve the management system after poverty alleviation resources are allocated to cooperatives, establish management measures for quantifying fiscal resources as equity of poor farming households, ensure that poor farming households can enjoy corresponding cooperative returns annually, and give priority to ensuring that the property rights of poor farming households are not damaged when cooperatives face crises such as bankruptcy; third, explore the introduction of third-party subjects for supervising and auditing farmers' cooperatives' use of poverty alleviation resources, conduct supervision and auditing of cooperatives' use, management, and returns of poverty alleviation resources, so as to avoid abuse and loss of cooperative poverty alleviation resources and ensure the equity returns of poor households joining cooperatives. Fourth, explore the establishment of an exit mechanism for poor farming households, have farming households that truly escape poverty and become prosperous through cooperatives reviewed and identified by third parties, and give rewards and commendations to cooperatives with notable poverty alleviation effects, enhancing their social reputation.