Vitalizing Rural Communities: China’s Rural Entrepreneurial Activities from Perspective of Mixed Embeddedness

Rural entrepreneurial activities play an important role in the development of rural economies and the vitality of rural areas, and they can also contribute to an increase in the employment opportunities of farmers and environmental sustainability during China’s transitional period. As a local organization, the community connects individuals, collective agencies, local authorities, and the market in reforming rural economies in China. Based on the concepts of mixed embeddedness and on the database of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper uses a binary logistic regression (BLR) model to analyze the impact of social, institutional, and economic environments of rural communities on entrepreneurship. The finding shows that informal, entrepreneurship-oriented institutions in rural communities have more significantly positive impact on farmer entrepreneurship than formal institutions, as well as economic and social environments. Furthermore, compared with kinship, neighborhood relationships and weak ties based on the population mobility in rural communities are more important for farmer entrepreneurship. Additionally, rural communities are the production places and markets, and their economic levels are positively related to entrepreneurship. Last but not least, compared with urban communities, rural communities play a much more prominent role in local entrepreneurship.