What is traditional Chinese society in vernacular China

Native China: What is a traditional Chinese society really like?

After stepping into college, most of us stay at home for such a long period of time for the first time, and looking at the differences between the anti-epidemic situations in China and the West, we can feel more directly the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western societies. What are the characteristics of Chinese society? What is the system that characterizes traditional Chinese society at the grassroots level? Mr. Fei Xiaotong traced the characteristics of Chinese rural society from the podium of the "Rural Sociology" course he taught at the Southwest Associated University and Yunnan University, and then he wrote 14 articles based on part of his lectures, which were serialized in phases, and left behind a short, popular, but penetrating sociological work for posterity --- "Native China".

As in the case of the "Native China" book.

As Mr. Chen Yulu, former president of the National People's Congress (NPC), put it, "This book is a masterpiece of the theoretical study of the traditional culture and social structure of China's vernacular society. Its analysis of Chinese society is incisive and thought-provoking, and provides an important reference for understanding the basic characteristics of Chinese society and culture." The characteristics of traditional Chinese society exposed in the book are exactly the background of Chinese characteristics that we need to consider in the process of development and modernization of our country's governance. All kinds of urban-rural conflicts and vernacular problems that exist in today's society can very often be analyzed and answered from these grassroots characteristics mentioned in the book that govern all aspects of Chinese social life. Personally, when I first read the book, I felt that Mr. Fei had peeled back the layers of the rural society to show the inner structure of the countryside; when I read the book a few more times, I could see more clearly the changes and continuous impacts that the changing times have brought to the rural society.

For example, regarding the characteristics of Chinese grass-roots society, perhaps everyone will think of many key words: society of acquaintances, the order of elders and children, neighbors and kaifongs, and the leaf returning to its roots....... So why have these characteristics developed? Regarding the characteristics of Chinese society, in the first book, "Native Nature," Mr. Fei not only gives his answer, but also provides an in-depth analysis of why this is the case.

Chinese society is rustic. The rustic nature of the countryside stems from the way country people make a living - by growing crops. The people who plant the land can't move it, and the peasants who serve the crops can't leave the land, and it is from this immobility that the rusticity stems. For people who make a living from agriculture, generational settlement is the norm, and migration is a perversion. To a certain extent, the settlement of people from generation to generation also promotes the characteristic of living in clustered villages. There are four reasons for living in clustered villages: (1) the area cultivated by each family is small, so-called small farming, so they live together and their houses and farms are not too far away from each other. (b) Where water is needed, they have the need to cooperate, and living together makes it easier to cooperate. (iii) For security, a large number of people is easy to defend. (d) Under the principle of equal inheritance of land, brothers inherited the legacy of their ancestors separately, so that the population accumulated from generation to generation in one place and became a fairly large village. Because of this localization, our native society is a society born in this place and dies in this place, and it is also a society of rituals and customs that have no specific purpose, but just happen because they grow together. It is a society of "familiarity" and the freedom to do as one pleases without going beyond the rules. In this kind of rural society, credit is not the importance of the contract, but the reliability that occurs when you are so familiar with the rules of a behavior that you don't think about it.