How to understand Fei Xiaotong's book "Native China"?

Native China consists of only fourteen essays, but it paints a vivid and relevant image of Chinese tradition, and he provides easy-to-understand explanations of many issues with insightful insights and appropriate analogies. Vernacular China has become a work that reflects the actual situation in China as well as having theoretical depth, and has had a relatively large impact on Chinese academics, becoming a must-read for many scholars to study Chinese issues. Fei Xiaotong's skillful writing has made the essays in "Native China" even more brilliant, and through "Native China", one can deepen one's re-understanding and knowledge of Chinese society.

Fei puts forward the concepts of "ritual order" and its "pattern of differential order" in "Native China," which is the most profound and concise distillation of the pre-modern Chinese rural environment and the living conditions of the peasants. When describing the differences between Western and Chinese societies, Fei compares them from the perspective of "group pattern" and "differential order pattern". It can be seen that "differential order pattern" occupies an important position in "Native China". According to "Native China", the traditional social network of Chinese people is based on the ties of blood, kinship and geography, and the people in the social relationship are like the ripples created by dropping a stone on the water surface, which are pushed out one by one. In such a network, each person is the center of a circle, and the social influence he produces is like a circle that spreads out, reflecting the degree of affinity of social relations, which is the famous theory of differential pattern. In the differential pattern, social relations are gradually pushed out from one person to another, it is the increase of private relations, and the social scope is a network made up of one root of private connections, thus, all the social morality in our traditional society only takes place in the significance of private connections. "In the pattern of differential order, public and private are relative, and standing in any circle and looking inward can also be said to be public."

The central theory of the Differential Order Pattern is: to take oneself as the center, to extend oneself to others, to take the difference of kinship as a model and project it to all social relations, and to evolve to take the blood and the geographic relations extended from the blood as the main social norms to deal with interpersonal relations and allocate resources.

The established order, ethics, customs and values of vernacular China are quietly crumbling in the face of the powerful "modernity", and in the cultural sense, it is in the process of spiritual bankruptcy in the midst of stormy weather, just like an old man in his twilight years, who is innocent, helpless and even hopeless.

The vernacular society described in Village China is a "litigation-free" society, in which people are familiar with each other in the vernacular environment, and "the actors are familiar with the rules from childhood, and take them as a matter of course, without asking for reasons. Long-term education has turned external rules into internal habits. The power to maintain propriety does not lie in the power outside the body, but in the conscience within the body. That is why this order focuses on cultivation and self-restraint." And because of the infinite scalability of the poor order pattern, resulting in the entire rural society has its own set of value judgment system, feel that the use of external coercive force and lawsuits, both for themselves and for others is a matter of shame, even if there are serious problems, but also to resort to mediation of the elders of a township, and finally even if you have to take to court, the responsible for the ruling is a strong parental nature of the "parental official "The first time I've seen this, I've seen a lot of it.