The root of the cure for stupidity lies in the changes that have taken place at the grassroots level in the vernacular nature of Chinese society.

Meaning: to maintain the form of the power of the elders and to inject the content of change, that is to say, to recognize and obey on the surface, but in reality the heart is not what it seems, and not to be able to object to such an unrealistic dogma or order can only be distorted, to give the elders a face, the way of change in the annotation caused a great separation between the name and the reality.

In the book, the author sees vernacular China as a specific system of traditional society contained in the concrete Chinese grass-roots level, dominating all aspects of Chinese social life, and illustrating the character of vernacular society with Chinese facts.

Fei argues that Chinese society is vernacular from the grassroots level. The land-based vernacular society has a very low rate of population mobility, which leads to isolation and segregation between villages, and "the vernacular society becomes a society that is born in the city and dies in the city within the constraints of locality". People grow up in familiar surroundings, and social customs passed down from generation to generation guide their behavior.

In such societies language is sufficient to transmit the experience of generations, and "the whole culture can be passed on from parent to child without fail". Accordingly, Fei pointed out that the difficulty of sending words to the countryside lay in the fact that people in the vernacular society did not use words to help them in their social life, and suggested that the root cause of the cure for stupidity lay in the change of the grassroots level of the vernacular nature of Chinese society.

Extended Information

Native China is a sociological work written by contemporary sociologist Fei Xiaotong, first published in 1948. Native China is a study of rural China written by Fei Xiaotong. The book consists of 14 essays covering various aspects of the humanistic environment, traditional social structure, distribution of power, moral system, law and ritual, and blood and geography of the rural society.

In Vernacular China, the author outlines and analyzes the main features of China's grassroots society in layman's and concise language, presenting a comprehensive picture of China's grassroots society.

The book focuses on the pattern of differential order, the difference between men and women, the family, blood and geography, and so on. The book is fluent and easy to understand. Vernacular China is one of the major masterpieces of the theoretical study of traditional culture and social structure in Chinese vernacular society recognized by the academic community***.