From the Soil (I): Understanding China

China as a networks and connections society.

From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society (Xiangtu Zhongguo) is a classic of Chinese sociology, written by pioneer Chinese sociologist, Fei Xiaotong (1910-2005). He had been taught by an American (Robert Ezra Park, 1864-1944), Russian (Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, 1887-1939), and Polish (Bronislaw Malinowski, 1884-1942) trio of scholars that field work was the basis of sociology/anthropology.

The result of his own field work in rural China in the 1940s was From The Soil, a series of short, very clearly written, analytical essays. The book is an extended exercise in noticing.

The rural China he describes is a social world of locality; of lineages rooted in locality and the soil. Even when a lineage produces too many people for the local land to support, they go elsewhere, but the core lineage typically remains in place (p.39).

Source: Dabbas, Unsplash.

Fei Xiaotong demolishes the notion of peasants as stupid with a sort of matter-of-fact brutality. They are clever enough at what they do. Unfamiliarity with the urban or the modern is not stupidity (Pp45ff).

He considers the social role of language, and the differences between rural society, where all language is spoken, and the culture of the literate, calling writing indirect speech. Rural society is centrally one of familiar people and patterns (Pp53ff).

The book is also one long exercise in the reality of people unlike us—both in the differences between the urban and rural but also between the Chinese and the Western.

People Unlike Me

Humans are beings of culture—which he defines as the collective social experience perpetuated by a symbolic system and individual’s memories. Humans are social creatures, using culture because we have memories rather than instincts (p.55).

Fei Xiaotong notes that selfishness is a problem with rural culture and Chinese culture in general. It is not a problem of incompetence—Chinese businesses can be very effectively run. The problem is a poor regard for public commons (Pp60-1). In other words, what is outside one’s networks is not positively regarded, or is even fair game.

As a concept of the public tianxia (all under Heaven) is ambiguous while, traditionally, the state was an extension of the Emperor’s family (p.70). People would not say they were “Chinese”; they would say they were a subject of Great Ming, or whatever the ruling dynasty was.

What Fei Xiaotong sets out is China as a society of connections and networks, of socially-placed selves, from which radiate out relationships with pre-set forms (Pp60ff). He calls this social order chaxugeji (the differential mode of association). He contrasts this with Western society, which is structured through organisations, which have boundaries. This is tuantigeju (the organisational mode of association). Even the Western family is bounded in a way that Chinese families traditionally were not. He notes that all this makes nouns for basic social units much more ambiguous in China than those used in the West (Pp62-3).

Fei Xiaotong contrasts the Western pattern of individuals with generalised moral claims versus the Chinese pattern of egos situated within networks and connections where morality arises out of those networks and connections. Operating according to proper form in the West means according to rules that apply to all in a given category or group. Doing so according to proper form in China means following rules as they apply in given relationships—hence the importance of knowing people’s ages.

While corruption is, indeed, deeply unpopular, it is often more about corruption being other families and networks benefiting. Fei Xiaotong distinguishes between lineage (shizu) and clan (zu): i.e. “a number of lineages whose members have the same surname” (p.83).

Fei Xiaotong quotes the saying that “between men and women there are only differences” noting that in rural China in particular, there was very little social mixing between the sexes. Connection was not via emotion (ganqing) but understanding (liaojie) (p.88).

What structures rural Chinese society was li—i.e., rites, ritual, etiquette. They ran rural society, not laws. What mattered was “publicly recognized behavioral norms”. If you follow them, your behaviour is proper (p.96). Li coordinated social behaviour in a society of deep attachments and recurring rhythms of life.

This pattern of traditions and proper behaviour represented the accumulation of what worked in highly stable environments. It was sustained not by coercion (law), nor even much by shaming or shunning (morality), but by being functional. It constitutes what he calls “rule by rituals” (p.100).

The consistent principle was that folk needed to be educated into following li (p.102). Hence, the logic was that one should punish the family of wrongdoers for failing to raise them properly (p.103).

Part of the self-organising nature of rural society was the use of locally respected folk (not officials) as mediators (p.104). Fei Xiaotong notes that Confucianism explicitly seeks to have no litigation (p.105). Rural society reinforced this—those seen locally as morally bankrupt would take refuge in the legal system.

Fei Xiaotong notes that reformers faced the danger of destroying one (functional) order and replacing it with a non-functional one (Pp 106-7). This, of course, is precisely what Mao (1893-1976) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did: horrifically during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and pervasively during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

He very much sees societies as interplays of conflict and cooperation (Pp108-9) and provides a grim analysis of the dynamics of subsistence farming. You kill or drive away the previous inhabitants because you cannot extract much surplus from them. People are plentiful, so not valued. If order is established, population increase eats away at any available surplus. The projects of ambitious emperors do the same (Pp111-2).

Rural society lacked the organisational capacity to resist dictatorial government, which in turn lacked the capacity to penetrate the countryside (Pp112-3). Reading From the Soil, it is striking how very different this was from the manorial systems of Western Europe. These were thoroughly embedded in law, had local manorial courts and were integrated into political structures.

The stability of Chinese rural life meant that the older had more experience they could pass on to the younger. The result was “rule by elders” (zhanglao tongzhi). One where seniors educated juniors into the proper—which is to say functional—way to behave (Pp114-9).

The core of a village in this society were the longstanding lineages. Such lineages are tied to place, to a locality. Newcomers are socially peripheral, and could remain so for generations (p.123).

The village is a place of favours (renqing), of gift transfers in a network of social relationships (shehui guanxi) whose rights and obligations must balance out, albeit over long periods of time. Fei Xiaotong expresses this very well:

By repaying the favor with a bigger favor, you make others owe you more favors in the future. So it goes, back and forth; the continuing reciprocation maintains the cooperation among people in the group. It is impossible for a person not to owe favors in such an intimate group. In fact, people are afraid to square their accounts (suanzhang). To settle accounts (suanzhang), or to be completely square (qingsuan) with somebody means to break off relationships, because if people do not owe something to each other, there will be no need for further contact. (Pp124-125).

This is why I do not like the expression gift exchange.

Outside the village was the realm of commerce, of on-the-spot monetary exchange, especially with outsiders. Villagers would even travel to a market place to do monetary exchanges with fellow villagers, preserving the village as a place of connections, not commerce, though “outsiders” in the village could provide useful role as intermediaries (Pp120-7).

When Fei Xiaotong writes:

Commerce cannot exist in an intimate consanguineous society (p.126)

he is expressing how connections (and social relations) come before transactions, and even more so in a society of dense, stable connections. Many of the dynamics he describes operate very similarly in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. Individuals, particularly women, use distance and/or Christian congregations to separate themselves from kin-connections so they can engage in commerce.

Chinese rural culture was, however, much less hostile to commerce than African—and various other, such as those of Australian Aborigines—kin-group systems. Chinese rural society had evolved mechanisms to separate commerce out from the structure of obligations based on kinship and locality without moving or changing one’s religious or other affiliations. The pattern you seen in Athenian and Roman constitutional history, in medieval manorial and urban European society—and even aspects of Abbasid rule (when they replaced tribe with locality in their military register)—of using locality to replace lineage would be much more difficult to do in rural China.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all repress envy, which makes them more favourable to commerce. The latter three religions all spread via trade networks, and among merchants, while Jewish commercial networks have a long history.

There are also periods of transition, where old ways work less and less well and new solutions have to be found (Pp128ff). Filial piety is very much an ordering principle (p.130). Trying to deal with change by new “interpretations” fitted into old forms can be a complex business (Pp132-3). Much of what goes on in rural society is training people to match their desires to their capacities (Pp136ff).

Fei Xiaotong concludes with:

In modern society, knowledge is power. This is so because people in society make plans according to their needs. In rural society, people depend on experience and do not need to plan. This is so because, in the process of time, nature has selected for them a traditional life design on which they have come to rely. Each simply acts according to his or her desires (p.140).

This is a world away from the transformational urgency of revolutionary Marxism.

As historian Frank Dikotter explains, purges during the 1950s had brought a lot of thugs into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), replacing those with tested commitment to Communist ideals. The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), with its command-and-control collectivisation and mobilisation, destroyed any positive incentives to produce, leaving only coercion and mass—often horrific—violence by cadres to motivate production. As was the case in the early Soviet Union, the level of cruelty engaged in by the Communist cadres was astonishing.

The brutality and cruelty of CCP cadres during the Great Leap Forward may help explain why Mao found it so easy to organise Red Guards and others to denounce CCP cadres during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

The Cultural Revolution then profoundly frayed the penetration of the villages by the CCP. China reverted back to the more normal situation of the villages not being able to actively resist dictatorial government but such government not being able to penetrate the villages. The result was widespread, local, de-collectivisation as land was divided up among families—who collectively paid the government grain quota. Reading From the Soil makes it much clearer how longstanding patterns could be (re)activated to de-collectivise from below.

From the Cultural Revolution onwards, there was a revival of local commerce which—as prosecutions during the Cultural Revolution make clear—had never entirely gone away. This de-collectivisation from below—and the revival of commerce—the CCP eventually decided to go along with, up to a point. Part of what Xi Jinping is about is rebuilding CCP penetration of society as well as re-subordinating the state to the Party.

This is not to say that CCP rule has not affected patterns of Chinese life. Many of the restraining civilities of Chinese life were fractured or destroyed by the brutal moral chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Activist Theory again and again treats the humanising local and personal connections that we humans have evolved to have, and operate through, with Olympian contempt—something that is true of Theory from the Marxist and Marxian to the Libertarian. (Libertarians are often dismissive of concerns for the coherence of local communities or the resilience of polities. The bland universalism of Utilitarianism can also be a dehumanising philosophy.)

As translators and editors Gary Hamilton and Wang Zheng write at the end of their Introduction:

Here is a clear demonstration that what passes in the West for general social theory is often, in fact, local knowledge—particular rules about particular people in particular places. (p.34)

Quite. Or, as a much more recent review article on the role of culture in human affairs tells us:

Although using very different methodologies, the studies all provide evidence leading to the same general conclusion: individuals from different cultural backgrounds make systematically different choices even when faced with the same decision in the same environment.

Worse, much Theory is not even true of everyone in the West: the people unlike me problem is pervasive. This is not a failing that Fei Xiaotong displays.

From the Soil is a deeply enlightening book which I commend to those interested in understanding Chinese society and culture.

References

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