——Take the concept construction of "resilient small farmers" as an example
Concepts are formed in the process of understanding practice. In general, the process of human cognition follows a process from not knowing to knowing, from not knowing completely to deepening cognition. The development of knowledge will be limited by two aspects: First, the limitation of the object of knowledge. The practice of human society is always in the process of continuous development, and what people can see and observe is always part of a specific space-time condition. The second is the limitation of understanding the subject. Academic research and conceptual refinement are the thinking activities of the researcher as the main body, and the researcher is always under specific historical relations and conditions, so any cognition or concept formed by cognition is historical. In addition, the direct and indirect experience available to each person is limited, which determines that his or her understanding is also limited. The characteristics of the human cognitive process determine the relationship between conceptual construction and social practice: concepts originate from practice and develop with the development of the process of practice and the process of cognition.
Political science is a discipline that takes political practice and its development laws as the research object. The discovery of practice and law alone is not enough to constitute academic research, researchers also need to refine and summarize practice and its laws through certain thinking activities, give it connotation and express it and form a communicative discourse. Concepts are the most basic units for refining and summarizing practice, and are the basic units for academic discourse and theoretical systems.
As a result of cognition, once formed, concepts become the origin of thinking and the starting point of logic. This means that academic research activities starting from existing concepts may also fall into the connotation limits and thinking norms of "existing concepts", thereby blunting people's perception, cognitive ability and thinking ability of specific and rich practices, and limiting people's ability to innovate in academic research activities. With the development of practice and the expansion of practical understanding, the construction of new concepts to deepen the understanding of practice constitutes an important aspect of academic activities aimed at practice.
Field politics takes fieldwork as the basic method and academic research path, emphasizing the closest distance from practice and giving the most direct attention. It is the basic path for the construction of the concept of field politics to stimulate the vitality of thinking by personally perceiving, experiencing and observing the concrete, rich and vivid facts, avoiding the limitation of existing concepts and knowledge on practice, and forming new concepts based on deepening understanding. Taking the concept construction of "resilient small farmers" as an example, this paper specifically explains the process and path of the concept construction of field politics, and expounds the value and significance of this concept construction in practice and theory.
1. The Impact of Field Experience on Existing Cognition: The Source of Problem Consciousness in Conceptual Construction
The conceptual construction of field politics not only comes from the existing knowledge and literature, but also from the impact of field facts on existing knowledge felt by researchers in the process of entering the field, observing the field, and obtaining field facts. As for the relationship between practice and cognition, Marx once said: "People are by no means the first to be 'in this theoretical relationship with external things'; just like any animal, they are first to eat and drink." From this point of view, as a kind of thinking activity in which people understand the objective world, concept construction has a greater dependence on the development of practice, and the formation of concepts must be based on practice. Only in practice can one form a connection with the object of knowledge and obtain a rich perceptual material about the object of knowledge, which is the premise of the formation of the concept. For the conceptual construction of field politics, entering the field is not only the basic requirement of the research method, but also the first step in the construction of the concept.
Academic research activities are a kind of subjective conscious activities. Not any practice or fact will become the content of academic research and conceptual construction, in general, those practical activities that have an important impact on the development of the country and society are more likely to attract the attention of researchers and constitute the main object of academic research. China is a country with a history of five thousand years of agricultural civilization, and China's small farmers with households as the main body have not only participated in the creation of a splendid agricultural civilization in history, but are still one of the main bodies of China's agricultural development and agricultural modernization construction today. Only by fully understanding and scientifically grasping the behavioral logic of small farmers can we provide a realistic basis for China's agricultural modernization to obtain a stable foundation. Thus, the intrinsic characteristics embodied in small farmers and their behavior constitute an important object of study in field politics based on practice.
As a research method of fieldwork, the investigator is required to have a certain reserve of knowledge in his mind before entering the field. These knowledge reserves are obtained from previous learning, and subtly provide a thinking paradigm and cognitive basis for researchers to observe things. The preconceived impression of smallholder farmers provided by existing knowledge before entering the field is the vulnerability of smallholder farmers. Marx and Engels once made a classic description of this, arguing that the sustainability of the small-scale peasant mode of production depends on the contingency caused by external factors: even if only "a cow dies, he cannot restart his reproduction on its original scale." In this way, he fell into the hands of the usurer. And once he falls into such a place, he will never be able to turn over." Scott also quoted the British economic historian Tony in his research as describing small farmers: "A person who stands in the neck-deep river for a long time will fall into ruin as long as a thin wave comes." These descriptions are a result of understanding that guides and regulates people's further understanding of small farmers in the specific world, and although scholars have studied small farmers from different perspectives, the perception of small farmers' vulnerability is still the mainstream view in the academic community.
In 2015, the Institute of Rural China studies of Central China Normal University conducted the "In-Depth China Survey", one of the important contents of which is to fully understand the traditional rural form of China and the characteristics of small farmers. The above-mentioned existing understanding of the vulnerability of small farmers was impacted by the "field facts" at the beginning of entering the field.
First of all, in the clan-type villages of the traditional Chinese period, small farmers were not isolated and scattered, and when they encountered difficulties in production and life and crisis, they usually received relief and protection from blood groups. This relief and protection consists mainly of two aspects: the first is mutual assistance. "There are generally two forms of mutual assistance and relief between clansmen: one is mutual assistance and relief between relatives in the same house, and the other is organized assistance based on the family as a unit." More important is the second aspect, namely, the relief of family property. In the clan-type villages of the traditional period, the mountains, forests, fields, ponds, etc. are public property shared by the whole ethnic group, called "Zhonggong". "Zhonggong" can be used for the relief and protection of economically disadvantaged families within the clan. For example, in Chengkan Village, Chengkan Town, Huangshan City, Anhui Province, the area of such public land even accounts for one-third of the total land area of the village. Under this relief and protection, the risk of "dying a cow" will not put small farmers in a situation of "never being able to turn over". Concepts reflect the essential characteristics of things and phenomena, and the essential characteristics are an intrinsic, stable, and universal characteristic. Although the fact that the fields of traditional Chinese clan villages contrast with the inherent perception of smallholder farmers, we cannot draw conclusions about whether this regional discovery is universal and whether it poses a challenge to existing knowledge.
Secondly, in the traditional period, in the face of complex and harsh external production and living conditions, small farmers will create a very flexible production lifestyle to cope with. For example, in some villages in Sichuan and other places, farmers have created a farming method of "hoarding water in rice fields and mixing dry water" in the face of uneven rainfall and difficulty in storing water in mountainous areas. Villagers divide the fields in their homes into three categories according to their geographical location and the degree of cheapness of water storage, "shallow paddy fields for self-hoarding, hoarding paddy fields for other purposes, and dry fields that are not hoarded and borrowed". These highly intelligent and creative production techniques and methods embody the flexibility and viability of smallholder farmers in response to the external environment.
Third, in the traditional period, there were still many club organizations in some village societies, and the function of these club organizations was to help small farmers survive various crises in production and life. For example, the "Rice Society" in the village of Jinan, Shandong, the "White Society" in Jining, Shandong, the "Old People's Association" in Yuncheng, Shanxi, the "Dragon Bar Society" in Chengdu, Sichuan, the "Lian Gang Association" in Shangqiu, Henan, the "Pole Society", the "Shelf Society", the "Shifeng Society" in Anyang, Henan, and the "Egg Society" in Suzhou, Anhui, etc., although the names are different, but the functions are basically the same. The horizontal links formed by these societies have enhanced the ability of small farmers to cope with external pressures and enhanced their viability.
The findings of these fieldworks show that in the traditional period, China's small farmers may face various external pressures in their production and life, but in the process of coping with pressure, they show the characteristics of "brittleness without folding, weak and not sluggish", and enhance the will and ability to continue to survive and develop through self-protection behaviors such as flexible response to pressure and mutual assistance and relief. The fate of China's small farmers is not as well as it has been known, and when a small wave comes, it will be easily destroyed.
2. Based on "field": reflect on the constructed imagination of existing cognition and new concepts
As mentioned above, in the fieldwork, we learned that the smallholder farmers in the traditional period are not exactly consistent with the existing cognition, and in addition to vulnerability, they also show adaptability, flexibility, self-help, etc., that is, the existing cognition does not fully explain the behavior of the smallholder farmer. Why does this inconsistency occur? In terms of specific analysis, there are mainly the following three reasons:
First, there is a tension between the infinity of experience and the finiteness of understanding. Concepts are generalizations and refinements of things or phenomena, and empirical phenomena always occur in a specific space-time, and the concept refined according to the empirical phenomena in a specific space-time may face the tension between the "finiteness" of cognition and the "infinity" of experience once it leaves the context in which it arises. Existing cognition mainly focuses on the vulnerability of smallholder farmers, which stems from the experience of smallholder farmers in specific historical conditions and spatial contexts. For example, the classical judgment of Marx and Engels on small farmers is mainly based on the behavior of French and German peasants in the 19th century. Compared with the socialized mode of large-scale production of capitalism, the mode of production of small-scale peasants is isolated and scattered, in the form of a "potato" between them, and lacks horizontal links with each other, so once they fall into crises and difficulties, they can only face the end of "disaster of destruction" and "difficult to turn over", and the impact of capitalist large-scale production on the mode of production of small peasants is "like a train crushing a wheelbarrow without any problem." However, China has thousands of years of agricultural civilization, and small-scale peasant production has not undergone the crushing of the capitalist mode of production, but has existed for a long time in its own civilization form and has become the main force in creating such a civilization form. Not only did "the mainland's modern agricultural productivity have a certain development and can meet the needs of population growth in the same period", and even until the Qing Dynasty, China's agriculture, represented by the small-scale peasant economy, was still the most developed agricultural economy in the world. If we only take the backwardness and vulnerability of small-scale peasants as the basis for understanding, it is difficult to explain the long-term existence of small-scale peasants in the course of Chinese history and their status as the main creator of traditional agricultural civilization. This means that the existing understanding of "vulnerability" as a core feature of smallholder farmers is difficult to include the experience of Smallholder Farmers in China.
Second, the relativity of cognition is difficult to cover the richness of practice. As the main body of academic research, researchers are always under specific historical relations and conditions, which determines the relativity of their understanding. The small peasants do have their dispersion and isolation relative to the capitalist mode of production, which leads to the vulnerability of the small peasants. The capitalist mode of production is based on a large socialized division of labor, which brings specialization, which increases production efficiency and brings about an expansion of the scale of production and an expansion of the scope of market exchange, thus placing every producer in a broader horizontal connection. With the help of exchange and marketing, each producer can obtain higher productivity and capacity than individual individuals. For socialized large-scale production, universal horizontal linkage is necessary for production. However, there is no exclusion between horizontal linkages and smallholder production methods. Mutual help and mutual assistance are also the common form of traditional Chinese small-scale peasant production, but this horizontal connection of Small-scale Farmers in China is not determined by the social division of labor, but occurs based on the self-needs of production subjects, and the objective result is to enhance the ability of small-scale farmers to overcome crises and pressures and continue to survive. The understanding of the "vulnerability of small farmers" is contained in comparison with the capitalist mode of production, but from the perspective of small farmers themselves, it does not summarize all the characteristics of small farmers' behavior.
Third, there is an inconsistency between cognitive logic and practical logic. Small-scale farmers have not only existed for a long time in China's history and participated in the creation of China's agricultural civilization, but also remain an important subject of practice in the current process of China's modernization. The starting point of the chinese agricultural collectivization movement in the 1950s was to transform the small peasants and put them on the road of socialist and communist collective prosperity, which was based on the fragility and backwardness of the small farmers. However, after the rural reform in 1978, the people's commune system was abolished, and the production and operation of the family unit was formally established as the basic management system in the rural areas of the mainland, and the small farmers returned to the main position of the operators. At present, with the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the agricultural population of the mainland has decreased significantly, but agricultural output has continued to increase, and the degree of agricultural modernization has been continuously improved. The thesis in the report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China that the process of agricultural modernization should achieve "the organic connection between small farmers and modern agriculture" shows the position of small farmers in the future development of agricultural modernization. The cognitive logic of "small farmers are vulnerable in socialized large-scale production" is obviously inconsistent with the practical logic of China's agricultural production.
Dialogue with existing knowledge based on "field" facts often prompts researchers to develop an intuition for further in-depth research. Since "vulnerability" is not enough to summarize the historical experience and current practice of China's small farmers, how should we refine and summarize the universal characteristics of China's small farmers?
Conceptual construction is a highly creative thinking activity, which not only analyzes and synthesizes the mastered factual experience to reflect or "imitate" reality, but also requires researchers to use the imagination of initiative to give concepts a highly concise and highly connotative idealized form. This dynamic activity of thought has an element of association, and as Lenin said, "Even in the simplest generalizations, in the most basic general ideas, there is a certain component of illusion." However, the association carried out by the thinking activity of academic research is not a kind of boundless imagination, but with the help of certain knowledge, the internal connection between different knowledge is found and established. In refining the concept of "resilient smallholder farmers", "association" manifests itself as communication and connection with existing research or knowledge in other fields. Professor Xu Yong once put forward the view that farmers have resilience: "Farmers in China's agricultural society are small farmers who produce from one family to another, and in order to survive in an uncontrollable natural environment, they must have a high degree of resilience and be able to endure all hardships and hardships. But he didn't discuss it, failed to conceptualize it. In a word sense, "toughness as a physical concept, indicates the ability of a material to absorb energy during plastic deformation and fracture." As a psychological concept, it is a psychological mechanism of recovery and growth under pressure, which refers to the effective coping and adaptation in the face of difficulties or adversities, the ability to be tenacious and persistent under the threat of pressure, and the emphasis on the growth and rebirth of individuals after setbacks." The connotation of "resilience" expressed in different disciplines is highly in line with the characteristics of China's smallholder behavior, so we believe that China's smallholder farmers are a kind of "resilient smallholder farmers".
3. The expression of "learning, physics and chemistry": based on the internal basis of field, history and theory
Reflective intuition and creative association provide the premise and possibility for concept construction, but whether the newly constructed concept is established or not depends on whether it can provide an intrinsic cognitive basis for the concept, which is a process of "learning and physics", which reflects the thinking consciousness of academic research and concept construction. The research paradigm of field politics is not only to present the "what" through fieldwork, but also to interpret the "what", that is, to reveal the "why". Manifested in conceptual construction, this means not only generalizing and refining the "what", but also providing a basis for this generalization and refinement.
From a further analysis, is it because China's small farmers are more resilient than European smallholder farmers because chinese small farmers have not been crushed by the capitalist mode of production? Field facts tell us that although China's small-scale peasants are also facing the test of external survival pressures without the impact of the capitalist mode of production, no matter what, China's small-scale peasant production has continued for thousands of years. This means that the understanding of the resilience of smallholder farmers must first return to the smallholder farmers themselves to find more explanatory reasons.
From the small peasants themselves, small farmers continued in China as the basic form of organization of agricultural production in China for thousands of years, and it was not until the agricultural collectivization movement of the 1950s that the commune organization replaced the household organization. But under the system of commune organization, "a labourer who increases the amount of effective labour input will neither increase his present income nor his expected future income, so that he will not be motivated to work unless he is supervised." The cost of labour supervision under the commune organization system was too high to be effective. For example, Fengyang County, Anhui Province, once sent "17 cadres to Xiaogang Village to supervise 18 villagers, and these cadres caused a great burden of eating and living in peasant homes, and as a result, the production of that year was even worse." With the implementation of the reform of the household contract responsibility system, the peasants' enthusiasm for production has been greatly enhanced. Some studies have pointed out that from 1978 to 1984, China's agricultural production increased significantly, and the organizational system of agricultural production changed from the production team system to the household contract responsibility system was the most important reason for the growth, and the institutional reform increased output by about 46.89%. It can be seen that family management is an organizational system that can better overcome the laziness motive and stimulate the enthusiasm for labor.
Further, the key factor determining the behaviour of smallholder farmers lies in the system of household organization. So, under the family organization system, how can China's small farmers be resilient? To explain the behavior of China's small-scale peasants, a group that has occupied a dominant position in the historical process for a long time and promoted the process of historical practice, it is also necessary to find answers from their historical practice. As Charles Tilly emphasized, it is difficult to make progress in interpretive research without relying on historical analysis, and it is impossible to explain the characteristics it has formed in long-term historical practice without going deep into the historical evolution of the production and life of smallholder farmers in China.
Historically, there have long been european manor peasants in the world, as well as Russian village peasants, and the common feature is that the peasants are dependent on the community to which they belong. In Chinese history, small farmers have undergone an evolution process from clan subordination to small-scale farmers, but the history of clan subordination to farmers is relatively short. In the early days, China's agricultural production began with commune agriculture, with the clan as the basic unit, the group living together, forming a natural settlement, the production of the tribe, and the land was owned by the clan. The family is attached to the clan village community and obtains cultivated land from within the clan. Clan village societies were subordinate to feudal lords, and the small peasants who were attached to clan village communities were not directly related to the supreme ruler of the country. With the use of iron tools, the means of production have been greatly improved, the ability of small-scale families in clan village communities to pioneer the land has been enhanced, and families have gradually detached themselves from their economic dependence on clans. The Qin Dynasty established a taxation system of "compiling households and uniting the people", and the household registration system, together with the taxation system, brought about the combination of "home" and "household", and small farmers in households became the basic unit of state taxation and agricultural production. Therefore, compared with Europe, China's agricultural society has long been free from the large-scale collective production system and implemented a family-by-household production and operation mode, and the history of small-scale peasant production is very long. This is the basic background and original tradition of China's rural society.
China's small farmers under the household system have formed a unique mechanism of responsibility. On the one hand, China's small peasant households have maintained relative independence from the government, in addition to paying taxes and undertaking military service, the state is not responsible for their production and life, "paying grain and being at ease"; on the other hand, it has the same status as other landowners, renting land to pay rent, but not having a personal dependency relationship. "No dependence" gives it a certain "freedom", that is, production autonomy, freedom of movement; "no protection" means self-reliance and self-responsibility. Thus, unlike European farmers, who underwent a long process of evolution of serf status, China's small farmers were the first to get rid of personal dependence and economic control, and gained relative "freedom". It is this "freedom" of no attachment and no constraint that gives small farmers a sense of responsibility and constitutes a source of resilience. This mechanism of responsibility is embodied in four aspects: the reciprocity of responsibility as a community of destiny, the sharing of responsibility as a community of life, the internalization of responsibility as a community of production, and the coherence of responsibility as a political community.
In summary, "resilient small farmers" mainly refer to small farmers with households as the organizational form, with the characteristics of internal responsibility to cope with external pressures, overcome difficulties and continue to survive. The concept of "resilient small farmers" is refined, combining the basis of history, theory and field, that is, based on the facts of fieldwork, through the retrospection of the historical practice of small farmers, the academic, physical and chemical expression. The concept of "resilient small farmers" has a clear extension, which summarizes the characteristics of small farmers in the organizational form of households; the connotation of the concept of "resilient small farmers" shows that "resilience" stems from the responsibility of households, and Chinese small farmers with households as the organizational form have resilience characteristics.
4. Concept Expansion: The significance of the concept of "resilient smallholder farmers" in practice and research
The value of a concept lies not only in its ability to reflect the essential properties of the object of observation and improve the level of understanding of the object of observation, but also in its extensibility, that is, it also has explanatory power when applied to other phenomena or objects. The extensibility of a concept determines the vitality of the concept. As far as the concept of "resilient smallholder farmers" is concerned, its significance and role can be further expanded in the following three aspects:
The first is to provide an understanding basis for the historical status of small farmers. Traditional Chinese small-scale farmers take each household as the main unit, blood relations and cohabitation and common wealth as the link, not only creating a splendid agricultural civilization in traditional China, but also remaining one of the main forces of agricultural modernization. However, there have long been differences in understanding of the historical status and destiny of small farmers. Some scholars take a critical attitude toward small-scale peasants, holding that the small-scale peasant economy, which is based on the private ownership of the means of production of the working peasants, is decentralized and isolated, and thus extremely backward in technology; some scholars point out that the small-scale peasant economy is the basic economic component of China's feudal society and the cause of the long-term stagnation of traditional Chinese social development. These views are more about the "backwardness" and "fragility" of small farmers, and only from the perspective of "resilience" can we explain why such "scattered, isolated, and backward" Chinese small farmers have supported the continuation of an ancient civilization as an important factor.
The second is to provide theoretical and policy basis for current and future practice. At present, small-scale farmers are still the main part of agricultural production on the mainland, but there are also different propositions and understandings in practice on how to treat this subject and what kind of fate this subject will face in the future prospects of agricultural modernization. From the agricultural collectivization movement in the 1950s to the abolition of the people's commune system after the rural reform began in 1978, the repeated exploration of these practices stems in part from the lack of understanding of the "resilience" of small farmers, and the lack of theoretical basis for transforming small farmers from Chinese practice. The report of the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China affirmed the status of small farmers in the process of agricultural modernization on the mainland in the future, and China's agricultural modernization is not to eliminate backward and fragile small farmers, but to achieve the organic connection between small farmers and modern agriculture. In the process of modernization led by marketization and commercialization, if there is no "small-scale peasant resilience" as a support, then the realization of this "organic connection" in practice is a lack of policy basis.
The third is to expand new research areas. The state is built on a certain social foundation, and the stability of the social foundation determines the stability of the country. China has a long history of unification, which is the main aspect that distinguishes China from the form of European countries. From the perspective of the traditional Chinese state form, although there have been dynastic changes, the process of unifying the state has not been interrupted, and society has not fallen apart with the change of dynasties. As Marx put it, "In contrast to the disintegration, reconstruction and frequent change of dynasties in Asia, asian societies have not changed." The structure of the basic economic elements of this society is not touched by storms in the political sphere." The small peasant household is exactly what Marx called the basic economic elements and structures of society that are not touched by political storms. That is to say, the stable foundation of China's social structure stems to a certain extent from the resilience of small farmers to survive independently and develop themselves in the long-term historical process. In this sense, it can be argued that smallholder resilience constitutes one of the important sources of national resilience.
(About author:Chen Junya, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Institute for Advanced Political Science/China Rural Research Institute, Central China Normal University.) Rural Discoveries Transferred from: Tianjin Social Sciences, No. 1, 2022)
