Understand rural communities

To understand the concept of rural community, we must first understand what is "community". From an academic point of view, community was translated from English Community by Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong in 1930s, and its connotation is that social life is the same in a certain geographical area. In this sense, the earliest community connotation in China should be rural areas.

So from the perspective of administrative divisions, when did the communities in China appear? It can be traced back to 1986, when the Ministry of Civil Affairs first introduced the word "community" into urban grass-roots management, but the community at that time was the urban community by default.

The popularity of rural communities can be traced back to 2005, when the Sixth Plenary Session of the 15th CPC Central Committee proposed "building a new socialist countryside", which promoted the construction of new rural communities.

Now, in the development of urban and rural areas, we have repeatedly stressed the necessity of urban and rural development as a whole, which is based on recognizing the differences and connections between cities and villages. The communities we refer to now include both urban communities and rural communities, which are called rural communities to distinguish them from urban communities. In rural communities, it can be a natural village or a collection of several natural villages, and its essence as the same subject of regional social life remains unchanged.