Why Chinese society is vernacular

"From the grass-roots level, Chinese society is vernacular", and vernacular China is the study of country people rooted in the Chinese countryside. According to Mr. Fei Xiaotong, the vernacular society is local, and under this limitation becomes a society born in the countryside and the normal life is to end up in the countryside. As a result, there is a special feature in the relationship between people, which is a "familiar" society, a society without strangers.

This "familiar" nature of society prevents the emergence of law. The rules that govern behavior, the laws that are unnecessary, the common sense that can cope with change, the laws that are dispensable.

The Chinese have a "private" problem, which Mr. Fei analyzes from the perspective of social structure. Unlike the modern Western group structure, the Chinese social structure "is different from the modern Western group structure. The social structure of the Chinese "is like throwing a stone on the water, the ripples occurring in a circle pushed out". As a result, the Chinese lacked a sense of community and an understanding of rights and obligations. The author draws an analogy, "Western society is somewhat like bundling firewood in a field, with the same ties and bundles of firewood, which are clearly separated and will not be messed up. In society, these units are groups." The author's intention is to show that groups have certain boundaries and cannot be blurred. Therefore, the "family" in Western society is a kind of group with clear boundaries, but in China it is flexible. This is a manifestation of the flexibility of the differential order pattern in the traditional Chinese structure. In Western society, power is emphasized, while in the vernacular society, relationships and friendships are emphasized, which also echoes the previous point that the vernacular society is a familiar society with no strangers. In fact, this situation still exists in real life, so perhaps this is a characteristic of the countryside.

"In the pattern of differential order, social relations are gradually pushed out from one person to another, is the increase of private ties, the social scope is a root of the network formed by private ties". The authors say that morality can only have meaning in the context of private connections. The author contrasts the characteristics of the moral system in the "group pattern" with those in the "differential pattern". The basic idea of morality in the "group pattern" is based on the relationship between the group and the individual, the group being a "reality" superior to the individual, the equality of each individual before God, and the equality of each member of the group in relation to the group." Each individual is equal before God, and each member of the community is equal in relation to the community. The group cannot be privately owned by any individual, and so the idea of rights occurs. But there is no concept of morality beyond private relations in the "pattern of difference" because there is no "pattern of community" as a prerequisite. Therefore, the concepts of "self-restraint, benevolence, and self-exceeding" are all scalable in the "differential pattern".

It is not easy to specify a generalized moral concept in a Chinese society where the "group" is not strong. Because a poorly organized society is a network of countless personal relationships. Extrapolating from the self, each of these social networks is sustained by a moral element, so that in the vernacular society, there is no precise standard of value that can exist outside of a differential human relationship.