Students,
Welcome students to return to school after the village survey. This year's village survey is very special. One is special time. It is still in the midst of an epidemic. As in the past, we were going to visit everyone in the village as planned and teach on the spot, but the epidemic in August prevented us from making the trip impossible. The second is the special region. This year's village survey sites are mainly in the nomadic areas of the northwest, and the geographical location is far from the central area, and some are even far away in the nomadic areas of Xinjiang. The third is the special background. In the past, the village survey was done by all the doctoral students of this institute, and this year only the teachers and doctoral students of the China Institute of Political Science did it, which is a little difficult for you. In such a time and space, the students did not have the guidance of the teacher, went into the village to investigate for several months, and had great gains in all aspects, and we were particularly happy!
The village survey was both fortunate and difficult, especially this year. But you also feel that this kind of survey is more rewarding than other surveys we have done. Why? This is because the village survey has to live at the survey site for a long time, which is a kind of in-depth investigation, which can also be said to be deep cultivation of the field.
The field of field politics can be understood from two aspects: from the field to the countryside, from the method to the survey. A very important reason why our China Rural Research Institute has become a key research base of the Ministry of Education is fieldwork. Fieldwork is the old foundation of the Middle Peasants' Institute, which has been maintained and deepened.
In 2015, the China Agricultural Academy separated from the former Institute of Political Science, established itself independently, and launched a large-scale survey of "Deep China Investigation". The survey includes oral histories, household surveys and village surveys. Among them, the village survey is the most important, the most core and the most arduous survey. First, this survey divides the country into seven regions for universal surveys, and its scope of investigation is unique in the country. Second, this survey is an in-depth investigation of the traditional rural social form, which has the characteristics of pioneering and rescuing history. Third, this investigation requires that investigators must be stationed in villages for at least a few months. Because of this, investigators are mainly teachers and doctoral students.
After the investigation of the village was launched, the teachers and students overcame various difficulties, made rapid progress, and achieved outstanding results. He has published 43 volumes of "China Rural Survey and Village Category", with 1 million words per volume, totaling more than 40 million words. The report has become a landmark achievement in the acceptance of first-class discipline construction, and it is also the heaviest brand of the Chinese Agricultural Institute. People who visited the hospital from outside were shocked to see the report of a wall. The report publications have gone global and have become the library books of many of the world's largest libraries. The village survey is a kind of "in-depth investigation" that drills a well deeper, which promotes the deepening and improvement of theoretical research. After 2015, the China Agricultural Institute has published a series of high-level papers proposing original concepts, all based on the village survey. Many PhD students are popular after graduation because they have received competency training that others have not had through the village survey.
Of course, the village survey is very hard, and there are many difficulties. In the past, we have asked for more and given less consideration to the difficulties faced by investigators. In a fortuitous incident two years ago, the village investigation was temporarily halted. During this period, people's understanding has also undergone great changes. COVID-19 has not only changed people's lives, but also changed people's perceptions. Considering the differences in academic orientation, the Academy of Agriculture is divided into three institutes.
This year, as the epidemic improved, the issue of fieldwork was revived. This is because our "deep China survey" is called "academic engineering" and has advanced rapidly in the past few years. The original village surveyed nearly 300 villages and seven major areas. If we go as expected, our survey report will be published in more than 100 million words. However, because of accidental incidents, only reports of about 100 villages have been submitted, and all seven regions have been surveyed, but several regions have not submitted reports. Publishers were included in the publishing plan and it was difficult to complete it as planned. We can't turn this major project into a "rotten building"! However, due to the difference in understanding, it is impossible to do as all the people in the past. Therefore, this year's village survey was only done by teachers and doctoral students of the China Institute of Political Science, and the northwest region was selected to fill the gap in the survey report. This is why only teachers and doctoral students from the China Institute of Politics have gone to the northwest region to investigate this year.
Village survey is the most important survey of our institute, and it can also be said to be the core competitiveness. Current fieldwork is mostly surface surveys. Fieldwork is like planting crops, the deeper the investigation, the greater the harvest. Some of the students who participated in the village survey this time have participated in the "Hundred Villages Observation" in the past. The village survey of "digging a well deeper" is definitely a greater harvest than the observation of "going around and watching the flowers". I heard that the students who did not participate in the village survey at other institutes this time are very envious of you. This shows that whether or not to conduct a village survey has a different effect.
Doing anything will be difficult. In particular, we are going to engage in such a large-scale survey, which is a large-scale academic project with the nature of filling in the gaps. In previous years, in order to save history, the task of fieldwork was heavier, but it could not be abandoned. Now we've adjusted the number of surveys. Only one village survey was done during the school year. Let everyone have more energy to do a good job of the investigation, but also have time to read and do better research.
We don't do surveys simply to do surveys, nor do we simply complete a project, but we base our research on surveys, and we get the resources for research from the field rather than just from books. This is the root of the Chinese Peasants' Institute, and it is also the fundamental place where the Zhongnongyuan can have its own characteristics. As we all know, there are five first-class discipline construction units in political science identified by the Ministry of Education, namely Peking University, Fudan University, Chinese Min University, Tsinghua University and Central China Normal University. From the perspective of overall strength, we are not at the level of the top four universities at all, that is, compared with Jilin University, Nankai University, Nanjing University, Sun Yat-sen University, Yunnan University and other universities, it is also very far away. The reason why we can join the ranks of first-class discipline construction lies to a considerable extent in our characteristics and because of the characteristics that have once been at the forefront of the subject rankings, there is a great deal of contingency. We have received five national 100 best doctoral dissertations (one of which is nominated), which is the largest in the field of political science. And these five articles were all written in the countryside for in-depth investigation. To be honest, people and schools are hierarchical. Otherwise the state would not classify schools as first class and non-first class. As a non-first-class university, our school must build first-class disciplines like first-class top universities, and only rely on characteristics and rely on more hardships than others. There is a comparative advantage to everything. Students from first-class universities read a lot of books and have a high degree of internationalization. We have no advantage over them in this regard. Fieldwork is not about not reading books, but not losing fields because of reading. Without the fields, we would have no character and advantage.
Then again. The village survey is very hard, even difficult. During the survey and after the students returned, they all talked about the particular difficulty of this year's survey. But no matter how difficult it was, everyone persevered, overcame the difficulties, and returned to school smoothly. The new secretary of the sub-party committee of the college, Hua Yin, who is responsible for the specific work of the village investigation, and our three doctoral supervisors are thinking about the investigators every day. Your successful return to school shows that the village survey is not a question of inability to do, but willingness to do it. Special thanks to you and all those who supported the investigation.
Finally, it should be emphasized that this year's village survey is a new beginning after the collective consciousness of field politics. People always do things unconsciously to consciously. In the past, we mainly used investigation as a method and a path, and we still lacked theoretical care and corresponding problem awareness. At the end of last year, we reflected in the process of reviewing history, gained the collective consciousness of field politics, and associated field methods with paths and grand theories, thus constituting an upgraded version of field politics, emphasizing theoretically cared investigations and fields-supported theories.
Field politics is a product of the great times. The background of the big era is how China, as an ancient agricultural civilization country, has moved towards modernization. This can be said to be a fundamental problem in China since modern times. Our field politics is precisely the path of fieldwork to answer this big problem of the times. In previous years, village surveys were mainly in the traditional form, figuring out the initial form of China's modernization in the countryside. Some concepts and theories have also been produced, such as "family system", "ancestral human rights", "resilient small farmers", "nationalization" and so on. But that's not enough. As an upgraded version of field politics, more emphasis is placed on the path from the field to answer how China went from a traditional agricultural civilization to a modern country. Not only has time extended, but more importantly, the field has been closely linked to the modern state, which provides a fuller basis for the production of new and systematic theories. From the survey of villages in the northwest region done this year, we can initially find that China has started the modernization process in a very complex and extremely differentiated rural society. This is the background of China's modernization, which determines the characteristics of China's modernization path and also provides a rich source for our theory.
Finally, I hope that after you return from the investigation, you will have a good rest, carefully sort out the information and write a good investigation report. On this basis, we will proceed to the next step of research.
(The author is an academic member of "Discovery in The Countryside of China", a senior professor of Central China Normal University, a senior researcher of the Advanced Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the first batch of "Yangtze River Scholars" Distinguished Professors of Liberal Arts of the Ministry of Education; this article is the author's speech during the exchange with teachers and students participating in the Northwest Village Survey on September 27, 2021, and supplemented and processed on this basis.) Rural Discovery transferred from: Field Politics WeChat public account)