1. Brief memoir Fei Xiaotong
A very good friend in Beijing is named Zhu Xiaoyang 朱晓阳, a professor in Peking University’s Institute for Sociology and Anthropology. He and I go back a way, and there is many a tale to be told in due course (he actually features in an earlier episode; but which episode? I leave that as homework).
For today, I just need to mention a recent blog post of his, carrying the above photo which is of yours truly and Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 in the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra. The year is 1982.
Xiaoyang’s post1 reads
Mr. Fei's encounter with the Australian scholar in the photo is worth writing a few words. David Kelly was in 1975-6 an international student studying Chinese at the Beijing Language Institute [now Beijing Language and Culture University]. The Institute on one occasion organised the international students to visit the Central National Minorities Institute. The leaders who received them spoke no English; the students had elementary Chinese. They looked at each other and couldn't communicate. It was learned that someone at the Institute could speak English. He was then brought over, the person looked like a librarian or even a cleaner, but had no trouble translating.
The visiting students asked, ‘How come your English is so good?’
‘I studied abroad in England’, he replied.
‘What is your name?’ a student asked.
‘My surname is Fei’.
Kelly and other social science students said: ‘Are you Fei Xiaotong’?
‘Yes, I'm Fei Xiaotong.’
‘Ah, you are Fei Xiaotong!’
The students’ questions thereupon turned to Fei’s [famous scholarly works] Peasant Life in China, Three Villages in Yunnan, China’s Gentry, then ‘How have you been in the last 20 years?’ It was like some long-lost relatives meeting. The Central Institute leaders, recalls Kelly, seemed to find this embarrassing.
A few years later, Professor Fei was invited to visit the Australian National University, and again met Kelly, now working there, and this group photo came about.
Many footnotes need adding to Xiaoyang’s account. For now, I'll just say that I knew about Fei because my BA Honours thesis (which scratched the surface of, inter alia, the anthropology of China) had been supervised by W.R. ‘Bill’ Geddes, professor and head of Sydney University’s Department of Anthropology. Geddes had in the early 1930s and Fei in the early 1940s been students in the seminar of the renowned Bronislaw Malinowski at LSE. Geddes was, unusually, in the mid 1950s permitted to make a field study of a county Fei had described in some of his earlier writings.
Missing from Xiaoyang’s post is the reason the National Minorities Institute authorities were red-faced: Fei Xiaotong, the acknowledged founder of Chinese sociology and anthropology, had been a prominent victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, punished for his ‘right wing’ deviations with (along with much else) demotion to the post of cleaner in the Institute. The leaders were stunned that a foreign student could possibly have an idea of who he was.
Also missing from Xiaoyang’s account is why Fei is in the photo standing next to me on a stone slab. It was entirely at his insistence, evidence of his great love of fun: he found it hilarious that I was a metre or so taller than he.
Now for the lasting impact of Fei Xiaotong: the following is my translation of an article published in 2017 by Xu Weiming 许伟明.2 The 'differential patterning' (chàxù géjú 差序格局) he refers to is a lasting theoretical contribution by Fei. We’ll get back to it—promise!—in future episodes…
Back in my hometown: rural changes that are occurring
Southern Fujian’s rural society is a very typical zongzu (lineage) society. The ‘differential pattern’ social structure discussed in Fei Xiaotong’s Earthbound China is clearly present in our village and indeed most rural areas in southern Fujian.
My hometown is a mountain village in southern Fujian, north of a small town called Gande in Quanzhou, Fujian. The villagers make a living mainly by picking and processing Tieguanyin tea leaves.3 Rural southern Fujian is a very typical zongzu (clan or lineage) society. The ‘differential pattern’ social structure of mentioned by Fei Xiaotong in Earthbound China is clearly present in our village and indeed most of rural southern Fujian.
My feelings may be different every year when I’m back in my hometown for the Spring Festival. The biggest difference is that in the past, we always got back to some kind of local festival order during Chinese New Year. But with ever more people going out to work now, the rural order has accordingly been adjusted. Put simply, the countryside is in some respects going Western, but while change is taking place, the power of tradition is still there.
This traditional rural social structure has been replicated in urban areas with the help of people who are constantly going out. The existing network of relationships, values, and traditional rules in the countryside have also been replicated in the city. But this is only one side of the coin. The other side is that the most important blood and geographical relationships in rural relations, as well as the rural economy on which they are based, have undergone profound changes as a result, driving major changes in the entire rural society.
Having also visited villages in Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan and elsewhere in recent years, I personally feel rural China hasn’t reached any definite outcome, but is in a state of change. Change has been taking place there, and the current state is a transitional one. My hometown, our village, is no exception.
Where is the countryside going? It is conditioned by our understanding of this transitional state, and by what we do about it.
Houses and land
Every time I’ve been home in recent years, what I feel most is that houses in the village are growing rapidly. Commercial housing is being built on a large scale in cities, while the villages are building houses of their own. A decade ago, the number of houses in our village was not half what it is now.
At least two driving forces support the burgeoning number of houses. One is the increasing village population; the other is the increasing incomes of villagers after they go out to work.
At times other than the Spring Festival however, people in the village are far fewer than before. As in other villages across the country, large numbers of young and middle-aged workers go out. Ours has not yet evolved to the stage where only the elderly and children are left behind, but two-thirds of the population live elsewhere on weekdays.
So the question is, who will live in these multiplying houses after they are built? How many days of the year are they vacant? Presumably some can only be used by their owners during the Spring Festival, with their doors basically closed ordinarily.
Note that many of those who build countryside houses already own real estate in the city. They were probably among the first to own second homes earlier. Those who already purchased properties worth millions or tens of millions in the city have to build a house in their hometown. But in future, such people and their descendants will no longer be able to return to the village to live for a long time.
The construction and decoration of some houses in the village cost CN¥ 6-700,000. In a county town or city, you can buy commercial housing with a considerable area-commercial housing often increases in price. A village dwelling can’t be rented out or mortgaged; the property rights can’t be transferred. It is simply an investment that can’t be realised and keeps depreciating.
In these terms it isn’t cost-effective to build a house in the village. But in fact this house must be built. Because behind the house, status, land, wealth and public welfare are closely connected. If an adult man doesn’t have a house in the village that clearly belongs to him—it can be inherited from his ancestors, or he can build a new one on the homestead, he can live with his brothers, or he can own it alone. It is unthinkable not to own a house, and no one rents a house in the village. In rural society, an adult man must own a house to be a qualified individual and then an economic member. If you want to build a house in a village, the premise is that you must be a member of the village, so this is also a process of mutual confirmation between the individual and the collective.
I myself am in this situation: I know it’s impossible for me to return to the village to manage tea gardens at some point in the future; it’s unlikely that I’ll die here, and my offspring seem destined to live ever farther away from life in the village. But even so, if I have a financial surplus in the city, I should return to the village to build a house like everyone else. Probably when people build such houses, they become an anchor for them to stay in their hometown, firmly embedded in its depths.
Yet buying a house in the city does not mean that you have city benefits. Above all, in cities like Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, what is really links you with medical care and children’s education isn’t housing, but household registration. So I am more willing to believe that so many of us will ‘build a big house’ in our rural hometowns. Except for a few people who do have the factor of showing off, more people really leave a way out in the countryside for themselves and future generations.
Roads and cars
A house’s perimeter must connect to roads. I drove home in the past few years, sensing most of all that roads were getting ever more congested. It’s not that roads have become narrower—they were in fact much wider after being paved with concrete, but there were more cars on the road.
In car terms, almost all roads are too narrow, not to mention village roads. The situation is even worse in other villages in the township. I must pass a certain village on my way home; I’m very nervous whenever I pass it: the road is full of all kinds of people. Passing cars sometimes meet head-on, and those following are on your tail. To your right and left are parked vehicles and passing motorcycles, and times when drivers can’t move are really challenging.
My worst travel nightmare is a place called Jiandouzhen near our town, where there is a section of provincial road in the town area, both sides of which are crowded with meat and vegetable stalls. Such a provincial road has turned into a meat and vegetable market with heavy trucks. Street vendors in the city are ‘walking ghosts’ chased by chengguan, ‘urban enforcers’, but in this vegetable market that crosses the provincial road, it seems to exist as it should be. It is used for driving.
Urban and rural concepts of a road are quite two different. In cities, roads are a public space of a kind. Private cars or street vendors may be found there, but they will be penalised by traffic police or urban enforcers. But roads in rural areas are more extensions of private space, that people take for granted to use as they please. Rural roads are public parking lots, often used to pile up building materials, like sand, bricks, dirt, etc.—and no one finds anything unusual about this.
Occupying the road like this situation is just a normal extension of the rural society’s concept of rights. In PRC rural social structure, people are actually in a network of relationships that centres on oneself, then spreads outward.4 Even rural rivers and forests are mostly in this concept: ‘What is mine is mine, and what I don’t need is everyone’s.’
Mounting numbers of rural cars promotes a gradual establishment of road rights awareness. And this is only a small part of rural modernisation: more traditional concepts of public and private rights will also be impacted. In the end, what we may see is a blend of urban civilisation and rural traditional concepts. Yet there must be a clear sign, that is, there is a clear boundary between public and private.
Village temples and ‘going out’
At least two-thirds of our village people go out to work, whether in firms or factories. Tea in recent years hasn’t been doing so well; a growing proportion of tea farmers work in slack seasons. Going back for Spring Festival you find the village very lively, but on a weekday, you’ll find it quite desolate.
Those going out to work come back, and many who do burn incense in the village temple, which is near my home. Its history can, according to my father, be traced back to the Southern Song Dynasty, roughly when our village was founded. The temple had a major renovation a few years ago. Judging from the list of donations, people who go out to work clearly pay more. Their incomes are higher after all.
During the Spring Festival, my family is as ever enveloped by the sound of fire-works at the village temple. Relatives and friends come by, their voices obscured by the sound of firecrackers. In recent years I too have gone to burn incense and set off firecrackers, praying to the image of ‘Marshal Gong’ (legendary founder) enshrined in the temple to protect me and the health of my family in the new year.
We all respect and believe in Marshal Gong. If our village had a summit of prestige, it would be he. He accepts offerings from generation to generation in the temple. In my imagination, the ‘Marshal’ knows the changes in our village best. What villagers most longed for in the earliest era of farming and education was a bumper harvest of rice and a prosperous family; later, some began praying for a good price for tea and good grades in the college entrance examination; still later, as ever more people migrated for work, there would be more prayers for safe travel and prosperous business. Those in transport would hope the transport business would be good; those making auto parts would hope their sales would be good...
The numbers working outside our village has been increasing in the past decade or so. After some villagers settled down in the city, they gradually became a large-scale group through teaching and guidance. Most typical are hundreds of people in the village selling auto parts in Beijing, all starting from a certain villager who made money and constantly urged others to go out. Even people from other villages in the township are selling auto parts in Beijing. Today you can meet such villagers within a few steps of a large auto parts centre on Beijing’s East Fifth Ring Road.
Such chain migration is common in Chaoshan (in Guangdong) and Wenzhou (in Zhejiang); some areas have gradually formed a definite business mafia culture. For such a small group in our village, there is currently no chamber of commerce to coordinate conflicts among migrant workers; these conflicts are rarely settled legally. Meanwhile the is to hope to intervene with the help of traditional lineage ethics or rules.
Such intervention—at first effective given the extension of lineage rules to the city—is clearly ever less do. With the differentiation of rural society and the increasing complexity of market rules, traditional ways of dealing with new conflicts will inevitably become less adequate.
The force of tradition has not vanished, but a new order has yet to be established. When debating rural reconstruction, not least of the rural order, we should bear in mind the inextricable linkage of countryside and city, and the rise and fall of endogenous rural forces.
Zhu Xiaoyang, "A photo commemorating Professor Fei Xiaotong”, Xinlang, 25 April 2023 [朱晓阳:“费孝通先生纪念日的一张照片”,新浪,2023年4月 25日 (in Chinese).].
Xu Weiming, "Back in my hometown: rural changes that are occurring”, Renxue yanjiuwang, 14 July 2017 [许伟明:“回到故乡——正在发生的乡村变迁”,人学研究网,2017年7月 14日 (in Chinese).].
Xu’s hometown is in Anxi 安溪 county of Quanzhou City 泉州市, renowned for its tea.
[Trans.] This is the core meaning of Fei Xiaotong’s 'differential patterning'.