What are the main characteristics of rural society?

The main feature of grass-roots units in China is that China has a large population and abundant resources. Everyone's physical and mental development level is different, and the gap between urban and rural areas is relatively large.

"From the grassroots point of view, China society is local." In this chapter, Fei Xiaotong defines the grassroots of China society as the countryside, which has three characteristics:

First, "country people can't live without dirt". Rural people take farming as the most common way of making a living, so they know the value of soil best.

Second, the liquidity is poor. People who make a living from agriculture "stick to the land" does not mean that the rural population is fixed, but that the relationship between people and space is not flowing. They moved to another place and maintained isolation and separation.

Third, the acquaintance society. This slow population movement in rural society makes rural life full of "local" characteristics, living in the countryside and staying in the countryside.

Extended data

Fei Xiaotong further analyzed the power structure of rural society on the basis of analyzing how to maintain rural social order. He divided power into four types, namely, violent power in social conflict, consent power in social cooperation, elder power in social inheritance and current power in rapid social change.

In rural society, there are both undemocratic violence power and democratic consent power, but neither of them constitutes the dominant aspect of power structure, because the former is limited by the level of agricultural productivity and the latter by the underdeveloped division of labor system, so rural society is "nominal autocracy".

Dictatorship "... in people's real life, it is slack and weakness, it is a hollow name, and it is inaction. "In rural society, there is obviously another kind of power different from violence power and consent power. Fei Xiaotong called it "the elder power", which is a kind of autocracy that is neither democratic nor different from the subject.