The question of why China's countryside is in decline and why it is revitalized is the key to understanding the current rural transformation. In addition to livelihood, society and culture, the element of people should be attached, because there will be talents for the survival and development of the countryside. Rural revitalization requires a "grafting metaphor" and a "chemical reaction metaphor" that transforms it. The development of the countryside itself and its convergence into the overall development of the world deserve attention. Villagers have their own choice of rural culture at the moment, and they should maintain a mentality of understanding and recognize the meaning and value of their own cultural existence, so as to reflect on ourselves. Rural revitalization should keep pace with the times to pay attention to a new kind of contact, cooperation and transformation that occurs in the process of different stakeholders of rural farmer groups and grass-roots organizations, and the possibility of a rural cultural transformation driven by this.
For rural revitalization, especially those who are really interested in Chinese rural culture and care for rural revitalization as the basic culture, we may need to really ask a few questions: First, what counts as a Chinese countryside? Second, why is there a sign of decline in the countryside? Third, based on such a decline, and the overall direction may be irreversible decline, how do we do a rural revitalization practice or practice? Between these issues, it is clear that they are both interrelated and have their own sense of the problem. In order to have a detailed answer to these questions based on actual observations, it is necessary to divide them into the following paragraphs.
First, what is China's countryside?
It is safe to say that the existence of China's rural areas is not only in the sense of livelihood, but also in the sense of society, but also in the sense of culture. As far as livelihood, society and culture are concerned, if the basic element of "people" must be attached, it can be further deduced that the three relationships combined based on the intermingling of the dimensions of this element of "people" may be a framework basis for our understanding of the past and future development of China's rural areas.
These relations are embodied, first of all, in the relationship between man and land in the sense of livelihood; secondly, in the relationship between man and man in the social sense; and thirdly, in the relationship between man and God in the cultural sense. These three seem to be independent of each other and cannot be reduced to each other, but in fact they are all organically and closely linked in rural society. In other words, no element can function by existing alone and not being influenced by other elements, which is embodied in the following aspects and embedded in people's lives, from which it can be directly observed.
First, look at the relationship between people and land. In China's rural society, the relationship between man and land is often the most direct and fundamental, and can neither be separated nor discarded, especially for a traditional country founded on agriculture. In other words, in a traditional agricultural society, no one who lives there can truly exist without a land on which people depend for their livelihood. In the long and profound relationship between man and the land, which has been formed by the history of the civilization in which man cultivates the land, it is only natural, and generally not doubted, that one would sincerely believe that everything one needs must come from the land. That is to say, people will believe that everything in life can be created from the rewards of the rich sowing and production of the land year after year, and agriculture is therefore the participation of thousands of people, and the land itself is deeply rooted in a kind of "lifeblood" based on admiration and reverence. Among the many stories about Chinese, even the overall impression of Chinese by outsiders, the story they are most willing to tell is often a person who is about to leave his homeland, and before leaving, his father or mother will carry him a handful of soil from his hometown to remind him how to maintain his attachment to the soil of his birthplace in a distant place, in other words, his attachment to home. After the death of a person, the traditional concept is deeply rooted in the burial place of one's own ancestors as much as possible, assuming that there is no such possibility, at least sprinkle a piece of soil on the coffin. Every year, when the ancestors are commemorated, it is necessary to add new soil and press new paper on the graves of their ancestors, as a best consolation for the ancestors of the dead. Therefore, in the concept of a culture, the living people, the deceased ancestors and the soil of the homeland are closely linked and inseparable in the constraints of a cultural value.
For the land of rural China, there is a picture that impresses those who go from south to north and from west to east. There, no doubt, most of the land is used for farming and producing grain, and for each family, the little limited amount of land that can really be used for cultivation will rarely be diverted for other purposes for no reason. If you still have the opportunity to see one of the most "closed" and "traditional" Chinese villages, the houses there must be low, small in size, and in many cases can only accommodate a family of a few people to rest at night, which is a satisfaction for the lives of ordinary people. Therefore, simplicity, hard work and endurance are the most impressive personality traits in such a society. This kind of concept that does not care much about the size of the living space and is more focused on the production of the field is actually a concept and value that truly belongs to the life of the peasants. Obviously, it is not that people do not want larger houses in their hearts, but the pressure of the limited nature of land production, which invisibly inhibits people's "non-division" thinking in this regard, which is objectified and symbolically reflected in various forms of residential architecture, and its characteristics are not high, large and high in the modern sense, but are precisely the traditional low, short and small. Such a tradition of rural architecture actually deliberately compresses the various unconscious desires of people for the infinite expansion of living space in the spatial arrangement, or this desire has never given it the opportunity to express it directly, and the space of the house also invisibly limits the possibility of this expression. But this, in turn, inadvertently preserves the maximization of the area of arable land that can produce the basic food supply necessary for the survival of the family, and the concept of "food for the people" is, in this sense, most truly embedded in a bonded relationship between man and land.
It can also be said with certainty that for people in the traditional era, the concept of "construction land" in the sense of today is not that of a large area of land, and as for the non-agricultural development of the agricultural land that occupies the grain production, it is also something that the peasants' thinking could not reach or desire, and everything in people's lives is how to use the maximum possible land area to produce more grain, so as to supply the largest possible family population, rather than having a large and useless place to show a luxurious and empty place This is most evident in pure agrarian societies. If you look around, large green and yellow farmland wraps around dozens of small villages, and then connects them with the outside world by narrow dirt roads, which is the form of a village in a pure agricultural society. From the Great Plain of North China to the hinterland of the Central Plains south of the Yellow River, and then across the Huai River and the Yangtze River to the extremely vast southern region of the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, a large area of fertile land is gradually reclaimed from wasteland to farmland through the so-called farming mode of human and animal power, and the succession and input of generation after generation has gradually emerged. This idea, which has been accumulated over several generations, underpins the persistence of this land-based agriculture and will not be discarded at will, thus forming a holistic picture of china's rural livelihood that begins with farming and ends with farming. For example, the Chengdu Great Plain, as the country of Tianfu, is precisely because of the water conservancy project of Dujiangyan, which has created a natural supply of drought and flood protection, and the agriculture here can provide a kind of life nourishment for every so-called "Chuanxi Damzi" who can live a well-off life or even be rich and leisurely.
It is conceivable that the biggest feature of traditional agriculture based on land returns is that it can absorb a large number of people to cultivate on a limited area of land, and because there is a stable supply of grain based on intensive cultivation, it invisibly contributes to a population increase, and if there is a more durable and stable agricultural harvest, the speed of this population increase will inevitably accelerate. It is safe to say that Malthus's law of population only exerts its powerful binding effect in such an atmosphere. In an agrarian society, a large number of people will depend on the land for survival, and the land becomes the guarantee for their livelihood, so for an agricultural society, the core problem to be solved must be the so-called "problem of eating", that is, how to truly make themselves rich from the actual situation of agriculture, and make life continuous, stable and have a solid guarantee.
This then gives rise to the question of how to deal with the relationship between man and man based on the distribution of resources, exchange, and social reproduction. For every chinese village, it is a relatively complete small society, at least in the local people's conception. In such a village, ranging from dozens or hundreds of people to thousands of people, everyone lives together, familiar with each other, and has close contacts. Among them, the traditional family organization is often the core form of this kind of settlement, people live in groups because of blood relations, forming a single surname village, or a mixed surname village with multiple surnames based on a certain family name, and the village social organization with the modern village committee system as the core is a new form of rural organization, but its trunk is naturally based on the tradition of blood village settlement based on one or more surnames, but there are only some new changes in the modern form. If you have the opportunity to visit a current village, you may find that the original core or the first village surname population to come to the village and name it after it may be gone, but the name of the village named after this surname is still inherited. The lag from the change of village name can be traced back to the original possible origin of the village, which naturally remains in people's oral memory, and thus can also be traced back to a network of kinship formed by clans and kinship. All of this will reflect the form and construction principle of the relationship between people in the village society, the most important of which is to reflect a social and cultural basis of mutual reciprocal dependence.
In fact, the fundamental reason for discussing this relationship between people and people lies in how to make a society itself settled through the organizational mechanism of a certain group of people, so that there will be no fierce friction, conflict and chaos at least for a period of time, which actually requires a long-lasting custom and the construction and survival of an unshakable village community system. But it is important to know that in the actual daily life, conflict and chaos occur from time to time. If there is enough time to live in a village, many daily trivial conflicts and various interpersonal conflicts will naturally appear, and they will be presented in front of a person, and they cannot but face them. The existence of village authorities and power institutions will inevitably play a very special role in conflict resolution and order restoration among these different contradictions. In a society, if there is no such institution of authority and power, such as the now-called village committee, then it is difficult to say that there is a real self-maintenance and guarantee of the order of rural society, and the chaos and disorder of daily life, or the chaos of "no place to reason", may become a norm. Moreover, the authority and power that exist in rural society are more self-consistent and inherited from history, which is often the authority and power relationship accumulated and passed down from the village for a long time. For example, the existence of village patriarchs, elders, and various civil authorities, in addition to the succession of families with the same surname and the majority of the population in the village domination. Of course, in the villages, there must also be some authority and power that are later given later, or that are directly given from the outside, especially those that are associated with the grass-roots organizations after the modern rural social revolution. For example, the power of the village secretary appointed by the township level government and the corresponding authority and dominance in the village. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, there are many external balance checkers that can meddle in or interfere in village affairs. For example, the existence of higher levels of government organizations, all of which are trying to directly control and dominate rural affairs, all of them collectively belong to the power and authority at the township level.
Finally, in the chinese countryside, there must be a relationship between man and God, which refers more to a transcendent relationship in the cultural sense, that is, the relationship of those extraordinary beliefs in the gods that transcend people's daily lives. Of course, the most common of these is a belief in the god of the land, which on the surface seems to be closely related or overlapped with the relationship between man and the land in the first point, but in fact there are differences between them. Generally speaking, the family has the "land master" of the family, and the village has the "land god" of the village, each with its own scope of protection and protection, which is beyond people's daily life, and at the same time affects people's daily life practice. For example, in the worship ceremony of the New Year's Festival, the land god is certainly indispensable; there are also gods of heaven, or the gods of heaven and earth who worship together; in addition, there will be stove gods on the stove, fire gods in the fire pond, road gods on the roadside, horse gods and cow gods in the livestock pen, and there are warehouse gods and the like in the granary, which can be said to be protected by gods everywhere. Moreover, these gods may come from a variety of sources, even from real people and real events in society, resulting in the existence of gods. In a most ordinary rural society, the process of sanctifying the dead secular can be chosen and transformed at will by the believers themselves, with the so-called spirituality or non-fulfillment as their highest standard. Therefore, this kind of god cannot be exterminated, nor can it be eliminated by means of extinction, and all attempts to eradicate this kind of country gods at all may end up in vain and have no real meaning. Because it is not unique in itself, but can have various forms of transformation according to time, place, and person. And these diverse gods themselves are constructed into a genealogy of interconnections that can be observed everywhere. The children in the village, in their daily lives, can learn from the mouths of the elders, there is no shortage of various spiritual stories about how to fear these gods, as well as the worship rituals of a certain time, a certain moment, and a certain place, and the structural paradigms of these stories must also be deeply preserved in their childhood memories.
Among these gods, however, the most important are those who govern the fertility of man, and some would call these gods "fertility worship", which is a one-sided statement that is not complete and fair. In fact, this belief contains a very rich cultural symbol and meaning that allows a society to be transmitted and extended for a long time, and among these gods are various names such as "Sending Son Guanyin", "Old Mother", "Grandmother", "Fairy Girl", and so on. The actual function of these plain names, which are almost ordinary human names, is to control man's fertility from the spiritual sustenance, and these gods actually reflect man's desire for his ability to reproduce and procreate in society. In the countryside of North China, the belief in the old mother, which is the most common belief in fertility passed down from generation to generation, is also extremely common, but people are also extremely persistent and serious about it. In fact, in civil society, people have traditionally not denied that procreation is a natural endowment, but they have never denied that it is also a sacred gift, and that not all natural forces can really achieve it, otherwise some people's "infertility" cannot be given a most reasonable folk explanation. In their view, when there is a desire to procreate and turn to the gods, the gods can truly "send children" to the person concerned, and in turn the gods can also take advantage of the "wish" behavior of the helper to have a lasting fireworks continuation and worship.
Thus, in an agrarian society, the three most important matters in human life, namely heaven, earth, and man, can be put together, and through the relationship between man and God, they can be consecrated or sanctified, and thus serve the satisfaction of man's desires or needs based on social existence, and in turn, man's desires can be fully reflected on these three aspects of divine belief. Thus, for the agricultural civilization inherited by the rural society, the monotheistic religion of the single god is incomprehensible to the belief of the present world with a "responsiveness to every need", which often deals with the existence of people with multiple desires, and the god in the concept does not and will not surpass the most ordinary desires of these most ordinary people. People who turn to the gods will be at ease because of their polytheistic beliefs, but they will also be uneasy because they are extremely hard to make a hard reversal of a single belief. For example, the monolithic religious practice of the successive temple demolition and god destruction movements in grass-roots rural society has brought about the extreme anxiety and fear cast on the people's psychology. Therefore, as soon as you set foot on the land of the countryside, the most easily felt is the existence of the figures of the folk gods such as "land", "old mother" and "Jade Emperor", saying that they are religious, but not so pure, but closely related to the short secular life of people's parents, which really reflects another form of transformation of the reciprocal relationship between people in general and the existence of the whole world, so that they can be closely linked with each other with the needs of rural society itself.
Second, why the countryside will decline
In fact, a so-called post-development rural revitalization, there is no doubt that it is caused by some previous decline, and one of the most superficial truths is that if there is no previous decline, what about the subsequent revitalization? Therefore, in order to solve the problem of rural revitalization, the first thing to understand is the original question of why the countryside will decline.
In general, the root of the decline of the countryside lies in the core element of human beings, which constitute social and cultural composition. If there is no one in the landscape of the countryside, it will naturally show a scene of depression and decline. It is conceivable that all kinds of left-behind problems are emerging in an endless stream, and people in the countryside go to empty houses and fields are deserted, how can this not make people dream that in the future, a kind of revitalization that will really change the countryside will occur? But man's existence is not an isolated existence, but a person who is in various social relations. Obviously, if man has his own independence, then he is faced with an untenable situation, but in fact it is not feasible and not easy to achieve. As we have analyzed earlier, the relationship between man and land is a binding relationship of union, which belongs to an inseparable existence between man and nature, and even if there is occasional separation, it will try every means to reunite it, and the shaping and impulse of traditional Chinese for the image of "deciduous leaves to the roots" is enough to illustrate this, and in agricultural society, these ideas are fundamental and decisive.
In such a fundamental concept, a relationship between man and man will really grow. It may not seem difficult for a person to detach from this relationship temporarily or even permanently, but it becomes difficult for a group of people to detach themselves from each other and live in isolation, and even if a group of people can really detach themselves from each other, the social relations shaped by cultural concepts cannot really separate people from each other. The Jews were almost scattered from the place of origin, a group scattered all over the world, but in the end, they strengthened their identification with the land of their ancestors, never admitting defeat and seeking to restore a sense of community and identity in the place where the ancestors of the Israelites lived. Similarly, for traditional Chinese, although the ancestral house cannot be inhabited because of its disrepair, it cannot be casually torn down and razed to the ground, because for a large family with a continuous bloodline, it is the protection of the ancestors, and once it is lost or destroyed, it will naturally produce a kind of concern in people's minds, which is inseparable. Even if people go to the ends of the earth, or start a family overseas, and seek a good job and a very comfortable life there, the protection of the ancestors seems to make it difficult for him to give up his attachment to his hometown, and from time to time he has to come back to worship his ancestors and visit the graves, or participate in various worship ceremonies. In Hong Kong's Jinglanshu Village, halfway up the hill in Clearwater Bay, the Anlong Dashu is held every 30 years, during which time the descendants of the Zheng family whose ancestors are scattered all over the world and whose ancestors are from the hinterland of the Central Plains can be summoned back to the village to do the ritual of "AnLong Daqi" to worship their ancestors. This is where the complexity of the cultural expression of the element of man lies, and it is clear that man is not an independent man, he is first and foremost a social man, and it is accompanied by a cultural man, and they live with each other as a result.
However, from the perspective of the reality of village agriculture, if more and more people really leave the land for various reasons, as an agriculture-based rural society, it will naturally be difficult to escape the doom of decline, decay and even demise. Therefore, the countryside of all generations must be sustained by an ideology that stabilizes the people's hearts and minds on the land, and once this ideology is missing, fleeing the countryside will become a trend, especially in times of insufficient agricultural supply. The emergence of the so-called "displaced" groups in history often arises in such a situation. The Chinese Confucian tradition, which has a tradition of more than two thousand years, emphasizes the ideology of filial piety, which is promoted to the rural society at the grass-roots level through a way of enlightenment, especially in the Song and Ming dynasties, this grass-roots indoctrination style is more obvious and powerful, so that Confucian filial piety can be deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, no one will really have doubts about it, it is also affecting the lives of the vast majority of people in traditional society. However, if the special events in a particular era weaken the binding force of this ideology in rural society, or even the collapse and disintegration of the village community, then the situation of chaos and collapse of the rural order in the true sense is inevitable. Therefore, today's rural revitalization has suddenly begun to pay new attention to the civilization of rural customs, family styles, neighborhood morality, and rural cultural construction, which is not an empty thing, but the root of all modern efforts to advocate rural construction, that is, to use various ways and efforts to use the moral reconstruction of the countryside to firmly retain as many people as possible in the vast space of land agricultural production in the countryside.
The cultural logic of this ideology, which deliberately binds people to the land, is actually not complicated, and its core lies in telling a good story. For example, in this regard, China's "Twenty-Four Filial Pieties" is a kind of storytelling, Qu Yuan's feelings of home and country are also a kind of storytelling, and "mother-in-law's embroidery" is not a touching tear-jerking and inspiring storytelling? At the same time, the "road guide" system in Zhu Yuanzhang's era is a story, and the "letter of introduction" issued by the village committee of the Mao Zedong era to go to the city to shop and do things is also a kind of storytelling, and behind the telling of these stories is generally an ideology of controlling and arranging the order of the crowd, which will exist and play its role in a specific era, ensuring that more people can safely and stably rely on planting land to seek a stable life, without seeing different ideas because of the income outside the land. It will not be opportunistic, to seek other easier paths to life, and thus to create a sense of social structural order instability.
Anyone who can tell a story will himself attract more people to his side, and the story he tells, as a form of narrative, has truly become an ideology that can unite people's hearts. For rural society, from the perspective of top-down control, the best way to tell the story must be so that after telling the story, people who live on the land can rest assured that they can work on the land even when the land supply is insufficient, and will not have the heart to leave the land. A really good agricultural policy, therefore, should be a story of how it is possible to bind as many people as possible to the land, that is, people do not easily leave the land for other livelihoods, but are willing to settle for the labor and sustenance of the land, even if this sustenance becomes more and more impoverished after increasingly dense population. In fact, the Asian mode of agricultural production, which Gertz calls "agricultural involution," which has been widely criticized by Western researchers, may itself be the most important mode of production in the tradition of Chinese rural society and cannot be discarded at will, and what is firmly behind it is an ideology that binds people to the land, and it is precisely because of this model that it exists strongly. It is really possible that more people will gather on the land to engage in land production, which is constantly trying to break free from the burden of agriculture, and Westerners who are accustomed to developing overseas can not understand it in any way. It can even be said that in the Western conception, this is a waste and a time-consuming and non-surplus struggle with what nature has done without a real way out, just as the myth of Sisyphus, which is fondly known in their culture, may be meaningless in the outcome, and true progress and irreversibility are their ideals. But it is clear that Chinese has survived most of the history of human civilization in this land with a way of reclamation and cultivation.
In such a land-bound vernacular society, everything about man must actually have a close connection with the land, and in the sense of telling a good rural story, there must be a motif of the story type that is closely linked between man and the land, and the two are inseparable. In a word, all the rural stories told by everyone may not be able to truly separate from this motif, that is, unconsciously through the structure of this motif and there is a so-called rural story narrative unfolding. Pearl Sydenstrick Buck (1892-1973), an American writer, accompanied her husband, Bu Kai, an expert in agriculture, to Jinling University in Nanjing, where she wrote the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature book The Good Earth, which deeply reflected the connotations of China's vernacular culture of this relationship of dependence between man and land. In other words, man is bound by the land, and at the same time he is creating a myth that man must live on the land, and the ups and downs of the life of the Chinese peasant Wang Long and his family from the perspective of westerners are not only a narrative about the fate of the whole Chinese, but also reflect the excellent motif of the inseparability of man and land in a Chinese rural story.
Of course, in addition to removing the human factor, there are also two factors of nature and society that play a decisive role in the way of rural decline. In fact, a large part of agriculture, traditionally, and even in modern times, relies on the supply of heaven, which is what is commonly known as "eating from heaven". In the concept, "heaven" as a kind of nature, it is the root of the existence of agricultural society, but also a kind of existence that really has to be faced in daily life. If in terms of natural conditions, the so-called "Lord God" in people's minds can ensure that the wind and rain are smooth for a year, it means that after autumn there will be a bumper harvest of land production, the prosperity of the people, and the hope of society; on the contrary, if there are various natural disasters, resulting in large-scale agricultural harvest failures or even harvest failures, the worst result will of course be famine, forcing villagers to flee the countryside, and then there may be a decaying social scene of groups of displaced people wandering around and starving all over the field. If this is done for a long time, it will inevitably bring about the disintegration of the rural social structure itself, and the chaos it will bring will eventually affect the speed, depth and breadth of its own political, economic and cultural decline. How many peasant wars in history, in fact, the causes may be inextricably linked to the long-term accumulation of the evil consequences of this natural disaster, people can take risks in order to feed themselves, and even kill people and goods, never sparing the cost of life.
However, in another dimension, the occasional rural decline has also invisibly stimulated the emergence of many new types of non-farm labor, such as the emergence of various forms of craftsmen and merchant groups. When natural and man-made disasters cause agricultural production to decrease and it is impossible to maintain a normal life, or when more time can be spent on non-agricultural production during the period of agricultural leisure, craftsmen, craftsmen and small traders in the countryside subsidize their families by earning income outside of agriculture on their own, so as to supplement the lack of agricultural production. Later, this development of "work" relative to "agriculture" based on the complementary mode of production between agriculture and work has been continuously strengthened, even beyond the scope of the village, and has acquired a demand for recognition in a larger area, and the result must also be the formation of a simple demand for work far from rural agriculture. This development path of continuous expansion of non-agricultural reproduction is most prominent in modern society, and it is not an inevitability of the development of an agricultural society, but precisely with an accident, which is closely related to the rapid development of industrialization in the Western world. It can also be said that the direct transition from the workshop-style production of the agrarian society to the large-scale modern industrial production almost means a rupture between the front and the back, and it is difficult to say that it is a direct before and after relation, evolution or evolution.
More importantly, in addition to craftsmen, craftsmen, and petty traders, there are also specialized groups of merchants who emerge from a kind of rural decline and become a dominant force in society. As far as China's reform and opening up is concerned, this measure fundamentally releases the real potential of the merchant group, and the original pure peasants have invisibly participated in the development of the road to prosperity through business, and what "no business and no wealth" shows is precisely a kind of logic of getting rich outside of agriculture. Here, we can see those peasant entrepreneurs who rose on the basis of the countryside after the reform and opening up, and the commonality of their road to prosperity is because their families are poor and there are not too many abundant agricultural resources to use, and the land is poor and they cannot make ends meet. This picture of rural poverty at the grassroots level actually inspires people to have to seek various ways of living or strategies in order to survive. Among them, the business of seeking intermediate price difference to make a profit through the exchange of goods belongs to one of them. Merchants may start from the initial peddlers, if the mind is flexible, encounters a profitable business opportunity, can change their thinking, they can jump from the role of the merchant to the position of the boss, the merchant and the entrepreneur; if the opportunity is lost, the opportunity to make a profit is not grasped, even if it loses money, it will eventually return to the original peasant identity of the village, and nothing more. It can be said that the village markets that can be seen everywhere are basically prepared for this kind of initial hawkers, and the markets will become extremely active because of their unhindered participation in the trade. They often transport goods from far away to the markets in the central parts of the neighborhood to sell, and many peddlers from agricultural origin have become specialized merchants directly from farming to merchants, and the more such people gather, there will be a concentrated group of merchants with regional characteristics. The source of such a group is often closely related to the geographical location where land is scarce or even landless, and the Jin merchants, Huishang, Zhejiang merchants and Fujian merchants in Chinese history are the result of being forced to be helpless and have no choice in the face of the pressure of life in this difficult environment.
But it should be clear that businessmen in China do not exist as merchants in a purely independent market. Dominated by the relationship between man and man, man and land, and man and god in traditional agriculture, the merchant, as a unique role in rural society, will constantly be subject to these elements of society and culture and return to rural society. In China's rural society, especially in the coastal villages where there are many people doing business overseas, the concept of "overseas Chinese" was born. The term overseas Chinese actually refers to the generation of people who have truly contributed to the society of their hometown and can continue to return to their hometown and return to their hometown, and a large part of them belong to the group of merchants who have become rich in overseas business, and they have become the core composition of the overseas Chinese group. It can even be said that the so-called "returning to the hometown to start a business" is also another kind of transformation of the relationship between business and peasants, in addition to the convenience of land use in the hometown, what is more important is that the rural society itself can firmly pull the people who go out to make a living in a cultural way to bring the rich people with capital back to the rural society and contribute to this society. Here, on the surface, it seems that the boundary between shang and farmer is clear, but this does not mean that the boundary between each other is insurmountable, and many times they can even be transformed into each other. Moreover, in the Chinese countryside, this transformation will occur more frequently, especially in the period of rural decline.
Third, how to revitalize the countryside
In the sense that time is passing or time is passing, it is fundamentally difficult for a declining village to recover from its original state. I am afraid that a habitual "patient metaphor" should not be adopted here to understand it, that is, the so-called thinking logic and narrative framework that the sick person can restore the patient's body through treatment. Based on such a "patient metaphor", the decline of the former Chinese countryside is regarded as a "pathology", and at the same time as a phenomenon that should not exist, and then with the help of various language violence-like human intervention methods to carry out a so-called expert diagnosis, and finally to be treated, giving a way out for future improvement, but the results are often counterproductive, and the villages that may not have any problems have been labeled as problems, and the problems really arise endlessly. This road, many people have tried, but in the end it will not work.
For China's rural areas, today we should change a perspective to look at the problem, compared to the "patient metaphor", it should be most adopted for a "grafting metaphor" to understand, in order to obtain a moderate and feasible solution. This is how to graft the buds of a new variety on the old branches, so that the old and the new are combined into one, and gradually form a new form that is more valuable and desired by more people. In this sense, rural revitalization is undoubtedly similar to the grafting of this plant, and the conversion of this model to rural revitalization can become a "grafting metaphor", and its meaning is more cultural, that is, to respect the regeneration and creative transformation of the rural areas' own development vitality. Moreover, in the face of extreme modernity, the road of rural decline cannot be turned back, it must be re-transformed and recreated by a kind of cultural remodeling, which may be the fundamental way out of the future rural revitalization development path.
In other words, it requires a synergistic effect, not a separation or dispersion between the respective forces. Or it is a kind of mutual reference, reorganization and merger between tradition and modernity, new and old, dynamic and static, and fusion and separation. At the same time, we can also use the "chemical reaction metaphor" to explain the process of the merger and reorganization of this kind of rural society and culture, that is, two substances that belong to the same stable state will each have a decomposition effect, and through the interaction between each other, new molecules will be produced, which must occur through the process of mutual contact. One of the lessons that all of us Chinese rural researchers can get is that rural revitalization should be based on two schemas, grafting metaphors and chemical reaction metaphors, so that we can really help to understand China's rural areas and carefully apply this understanding to the practice of rural revitalization. In a rural environment, the combination of land and non-land elements, the combination of man and machine, the combination of agriculture and commerce, the combination of countryside and art, the combination of handicraft and design, the combination of modern administration and village affairs, and even the combination of temples and alternative medicine, all these possible and impossible inter-sexual combination processes, must produce something that has not existed in the previous world, which is a creative transformation in a real cultural sense. Because culture has always existed in the process of constant creation and change.
In this sense, rural revitalization must also have a new reaction to create a combination of different elements, that is, there will inevitably be a decline of some traditional elements, while another new element will emerge and become extremely active, thus stimulating the traditional rural transformation and becoming a real sense of rural revitalization. Based on the above thinking, there are some dimensions that cannot be thought about in rural revitalization, which may also be the key to China's rural revitalization in the future. First, there is a real new element that is introduced and functioning in the countryside to replace the inherent or traditional elements that do not adapt to the new situation. Second, the new elements can really have a close combination with the traditional elements. Third, there must be a new form of expression of rural culture that can emerge, or be expressed through a transformation. Thinking about the rural revitalization approach is a neutral path choice, that is, neither too radical nor too conservative, taking it as moderate, focusing on the combination of various elements and adapting to the new creation of a new scene. Based on such thinking, we can look at a specific case, which may give us some enlightenment on how to have real rural revitalization.
Recently, we did a fieldwork in the countryside of Lu'an, western Anhui Province, where Sanyuan Town in Yeji District can be regarded as a typical township engaged in agricultural production, which has nine villages and one community under its jurisdiction. In this Yeji district, which has been connecting the traffic between the Dabie Mountains and the Huai River Basin since ancient times, in the current era seems to be invisibly in the process of transformation and upgrading of the old rural industry to the new industry, all the experience seems to be presented in a new look, the countryside here has been closely linked with the development planning of the Yeji District and the townships, and various forms of characteristic agriculture have slowly penetrated into the production of rural agriculture through the recommendation of township cadres. In Sanyuan Town, which we visited intensively, there was a traditional industry that was once famous for the production and processing of noodles, which originally belonged to a one-family handicraft workshop, and the output was also limited, and its proportion in economic development was naturally more limited. There is only a bridge between The Yeji District of Anhui and Gushi County of Henan, and the culture can see a shadow of the Central Plains culture, for example, "eating noodles" during the New Year's Festival has become the happiest memory of the elderly, and even the children have a full moon and the elderly have a birthday, and hanging noodles is indispensable. Therefore, in the border area from Yeji to Gushi County, you can still see that the shops on both sides still have made noodles for sale, and later there are villages that specialize in making noodles, and today people there still have to make noodles by hand when they are idle. For example, in a village called Fengqiao Village on the banks of the famous artificial river, fengqiao river, almost every household is doing the production and operation of handmade noodles, and "hollow noodles" has become a characteristic sign here. But if you chat with the township cadres here, you know that they believe that this craft, although traditional, belongs to a declining industry, accounting for only a small share of the economic plate in the entire Yeji district or in the entire township.
Based on this decline, but also in order to open up the emerging industry of Sanyuan Town, the township organized villagers to go to Qianjiang, Hubei Province to learn the technology of rice and shrimp farming, and then came back to introduce the rice-shrimp symbiosis model of crayfish farming in their own rice fields. As a result of breeding, the original gross income per mu of rice is generally only about one thousand yuan, and now the income from breeding lobsters per mu of rice field at the same time is around two thousand yuan, farmers see the benefits of this newly introduced industry, they have begun to follow suit, the most famous Xintang village has more than five hundred acres of rice fields for breeding crayfish. Each kilogram of lobster is generally more than thirty yuan a kilogram when it is first listed, and in comparison, the income is significantly greater than the rice income of the original rice field, and it can be planted without pollution and raised lobsters. Now the town uses a new concept to refer to this new industry introduction practice, that is, "one village and one product", that is, each village will have some kind of representative industry in the centralized development, which will drive the transformation and upgrading of the village itself in industrial development. Such an approach has invisibly changed the industrial structure of the countryside, and if today's rural areas want to have a real sense of revitalization, there is no actual industry that can bring one party to get rich, and the so-called rural revitalization is bound to be difficult to land, expand and achieve.
Today's Chinese countryside is no longer trapped by the land problems of the era described by Fei Xiaotong in his "Jiangcun Economy", the land has begun to have some "surplus" in the eyes of the rural villagers, the rice production that used to be in this area twice a year has disappeared, most of the farmers here only grow one season of rice, the land is more vacant, they would rather go to the city to work than to multiply another crop of rice. For the farmers here, the most important thing is to have newer technology or industry to really drive them to get rich, so in the eyes of the locals, the most urgently needed is the talent in agriculture, that is, the talent that can really stay in the village to help them develop new industries to become rich. Breeding lobster in the rice field is a technology, this technology is to be introduced from the outside, in addition to the Giant River Prawn and Australian lobster, also need to be introduced from the outside, the introduction of this new technology from the outside, in a certain sense to drive the industrial transformation and upgrading of the countryside. For example, Mr. Chen, a villager in Shuangtang Village who earned money working in Zhejiang, he had a sense of introducing new industries beyond other villagers, and after an inspection, he specially introduced the hanging melon planting technology from the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences to produce a hanging melon seed rich in unsaturated fatty acids, which is said to sell for up to 50 yuan per kilogram. To this end, he opened a cooperative in the village and organized the villagers to plant and produce hanging melon seeds. When we went to visit him, it was in the middle of summer, and after entering the more than 100 acres of yard he contracted, we would see that the elevated shelves were crawling with dense hanging melon seedlings, and one by one the hanging melons were already about to mature. This kind of planting technology or information for villagers to save labor, time and land space needs to be imported from the outside, and it must be properly combined with the local idle land and labor force, resulting in the touch effect of the "chemical reaction metaphor" mentioned above, generating new action momentum, so that the local people can make a fortune as soon as possible.
In fact, the introduction of all these new development factors is invisibly stimulating the transformation of traditional agriculture into modern agriculture, which can be said to be a kind of profit-seeking agriculture, which must also rely on the market vane to lead the traditional small farmers who cannot become a scale to move towards a road that can really get rich quickly. In this sense, rural revitalization must be a kind of industrial drive as the premise, for ordinary farmers, when the traditional industry can not really get rich quickly, the interest drive of the newly introduced industry is the most important, but also to be pursued in the first place. This kind of interest that farmers have to pursue in itself can be described as the real source of motivation for the motor of rural revitalization. Here, at the same time, we see a very interesting phenomenon, that is, in the introduction of new rural industries, a new rural development path or model of "easy from top to bottom, difficult from bottom to top", that is, whatever the township government or outside capital tries to introduce, this becomes very easy to achieve in the countryside at present, but it seems very difficult for the people to get up and use a new industry to change the original old industrial structure. This invisibly reminds us of what Fei Xiaotong called the "disintegration of the dual-track system", in fact, in the era of "rural reconstruction" he discussed, there was already a decisive role played by the forces extended by the modern state, and the bottom-up track from the grass-roots level of the people was constantly blocked, and even finally blocked by excessive siltation. It seems that after more than seventy years, the once-blocked dual-track system has even been completely transformed into a single-track system, and the peasants' lives have entered a new development track that is linked up and down, or completely driven by a top-down.
At this point, it really shows that there is a kind of rural society's most practical "prosperity is known", and the peasants' desire for a prosperous life has always been so hot and strong, which was true at the beginning of reform and opening up, and it is still the same today more than forty years later. At this time, the state, as a party-political model that adheres to the principle of "not forgetting the original intention", may be able to make such a generalization of its new rural line, or the development path that can really be implemented at the grass-roots level, that is, it does not care whether the whole people are really willing to accept it, but thinks that as long as it can really benefit the local people, it will be promoted first, and in practice, it will "cross the river by feeling the stones" and gradually improve it. And insist on a role model or demonstration effect to guide rural villagers to have a change in life as much as possible, in the process, most of people's lives will naturally change before and after. Moreover, the engine effect of rural social development, once in the countryside, played by merchants, hawkers and the affluent economic elite, is being replaced by an increasingly up-to-date, increasingly efficient and standardized, intensive grass-roots administration that can really enter rural governance, and thus the group of businessmen and entrepreneurs has become a group that is not autonomous in the countryside, but can carry out various forms of rural construction with grass-roots administration through active intervention in rural affairs. For example, in the current activities of "one village and one product" carried out in the rural areas of western Anhui, we have really seen that a certain "product" has been introduced in a certain village, which is actually the introduction of a way to earn money, and it is difficult for peasants' lives and monorail politics to be most closely linked and combined with a supply-oriented money, capital, finance and mutual benefits. What china has really implemented since the 21st century is that it can make a top-down monorail busy and fully loaded, and everyone involved in it is very cautious and conscientious, and they as young grassroots cadres are energetic and energetic, but also hope that there will be a significant transformation and an effect on the performance growth of the people they serve and themselves.
Here, in fact, there is also what I call two metaphorical effects on the understanding of rural revitalization, one is the effect of grafting metaphors, and the other is the metaphorical effect of chemical reactions. From these two metaphorical effects, we can foresee that in the present and future Chinese countryside, the introduction of a new industry and the replacement of the old obsolete industry may occur every once in a while, and the introduction of a new industry and the lasting maintenance of time will inevitably bring about a major change or transformation of the agricultural cultural pattern inherent in the countryside. In this sense, a purely traditional thing is sent to the museum in a dignified manner, and we see that the agricultural museum opened by the Sanyuan village community here has a collection of traditional irrigation water wheels, plough rakes and kerosene lamps that have been abandoned for a long time, which are locked in glass frames and become objects that can only be examined and evoked nostalgia, which is obviously to be unconsciously defined by modern people as a pre-modern thing and permanently made into a museum-style collection. In contrast to this pre-modern or traditional, or local consciousness, another thing that is extremely clear and constantly surging in the peasant consciousness is a strong concept of seeking to get rich, and people are looking forward to the early advent of the industry that can make them rich from the top down and the effect of obvious change before and after. In this respect, they are like expecting the greatest expectation of the time, energy, and wealth they have invested in the relationship between man and God before they have invested itself in it, and it is the most affordable and practical spiritual experience for them to be able to bring them real benefits through the taking root of a new industry. At the same time, we also seem to see a postmodern shadow swimming in the various new forms that have been transformed, that is, a new promotion of rural cultural values driven by light luxury tourism consumption. Although the villages of Sanyuan Town in western Anhui are not yet obvious, it can be seen from people's daily discourse that they are eager for this situation to emerge and play a role. At this time, people have begun to re-examine the countryside in which they live, and in terms of concept, the countryside has increasingly transformed into a symbol of the most "escape" in modern people's lives, including the green waters and green mountains here, including fresh food and air, as well as the inherent cultural traditions and customs of those villages that can really slow down life.
In this regard, it is accompanied by a change in the appearance of the rural environment, driven by the concept of "beautiful countryside" from top to bottom, one village after another is trying to do artificial design changes in the environment, which is the result of the introduction of a new technology, a new concept and a new comprehensive effect formed in the context of the new era in the countryside, resulting in a variety of new designs, new creations and new lives for the surrounding environment and living needs. We have seen the design of the original tribal era of the kind of hut-style modern toilet settled in the village, but the toilet is a full range of clean and tidy modern facilities, and the expensive design and construction, but also let people finally distinguish whether they are in the countryside or in the city. There are also a variety of sports facilities that have appeared in the countryside, such as the newly installed sports facilities in the streets and alleys of the city, and the village parks surrounded by mountains and rivers, which have made a substantial change in the content and meaning of farmers' lives, and for a time square dancing in the new squares of the countryside has become a fashionable and public activity project that everyone is willing to participate in.
In this sense, we seem to have found a more interesting phenomenon. Many years ago, we were in the pursuit of a picture of rural autonomy, the countryside is a closed world relative to the outside world, that is, a kind of "countryside" tied to the land, but today, this closure is almost never seen again, and various new forms of authority and power make this original and imperfect villagers' autonomy almost a kind of silence. While the villagers cede some of their autonomy, the village itself has also received many development benefits, which may be the reason why the villagers are willing to raise their hands to welcome and agree, including the hardening of roads, water, electricity and even ventilation through poverty alleviation projects from the outside in. In this regard, the construction of rural public facilities has been vigorously promoted, at this time the more administrative factors of the village committees have been strengthened, the administrative management of the villages has been improved by a kind of top-down intervention, and in the process, the number of people dispatched by the townships and towns to serve in the two village committees has also begun to increase and become more and more common. Therefore, the functions of the villagers' committees are more focused on a kind of top-down administrative orders and appointments, and the clear distinction of responsibilities and rights also allows various new roles in the villages to participate in the construction of the villages, so there is a space and opportunity to play an active role.
The opposite situation, and the feeling is more obvious is the complete withdrawal of a traditional force, or the lack of a soil environment in which it can continue to live, which naturally brings about the lack of a moral indoctrination force to maintain the stability of the daily order in the countryside, whether within the family or within the village, with the intrusion of capital forces and the growth of everyone based on individual consciousness, the maintenance of traditional moral atmospheres begins to be worrying. In traditional fables like "The Farmer and the Snake", the old impression that the peasant is a group of good people is gradually blurred or disintegrated in the process of this moral transformation, and the image of Wang Long in Pearl Buck's "Earth" is simple and unpretentious and filial piety has undergone a complete reversal. In the eyes of many people, the calculating image of the "sheep in wolf skin" in Liu Zhenyun's novel "My Name is Liu Yuejin" is more and more obviously affecting people's judgment of the peasants in people's concepts, and the image of the simple peasants must be dressed up as a fierce and cruel wolf. The overall understanding of the peasants by the cadre groups involved in rural governance at the grassroots level clearly reflects an impotent and irredeemable posture in an atmosphere where traditional moral indoctrination is gradually missing.
At the same time, the stories of those who can keep the peasants living and working in the village have become less and less in the daily narrative, and people can't find a better reason not to work and stay at home to live a comfortable and comfortable life of "thirty acres of land, a cow, a wife and children hot kiln head", especially for young and strong men. Migrant work has become the "first productive force" in the eyes of many local farmers, and both business and migrant work are regarded as superior to farmers in terms of value, and it can be seen from the dense shops in the urban area where the township is located that the people here are surging in the pursuit of the value of modern life beyond the land. One serious consequence of this is the inadequate supply of rural labour and the contrast between the large number of migrant workers in rural labour, and the growing number of peasants who prefer to spend more time in the crowded cities than return to their rural homes, some who have changed from returning home only once a year for the New Year to being often unable to return. The villages that cannot be retained in the streets and alleys have become a new motif and prototype for telling rural stories. Rural revitalization is also invisibly calling for more people to return to the countryside, after all, a basic law is that where people go, funds and benefits will naturally go, and a kind of development splendor will naturally get a real manifestation there.
What is more important is that a new model of combining "officials" and "businessmen" has begun to occupy an increasingly important position in the operation of administrative organs at the county and township levels, which is the institutional arrangement of "attracting investment" in regional relations caused by regional differences. The Sanyuan Town we investigated, which is administratively subordinate to the Yeji District of Lu'an City, has carried out various forms of investment promotion work as an economic pilot area, and the core approach is how to concentrate on transforming the original use of rural land, through the mechanism of returning to the hometown to start a business and preferentially absorbing enterprises in the village to open new industries, or through the establishment of various poverty alleviation projects in the village to drive farmers to become rich. For example, many poor villages have wood processing factories funded by townships and contracted by contractors, in which a fixed part of the income is returned to the village committee as a collective income of the village every year. This reflects the fragmentation of small-scale peasant operation beyond each family and gradually formed a scale effect on agricultural development, from the original practical response of peasants and workers that every household has to do to complement each other, it has begun to move towards a large-scale group separation of agricultural and industrial workers, but this is not a complete separation, but each is seeking a greater space for development, which is fundamentally based on the tradition of industrial development created by the complementarity of traditional agriculture and industry. For example, in this area, the processing of building formwork based on the most traditional wood distribution center has changed from the production of one household to the large-scale production and transformation and upgrading of products in the Yeji Economic Development Zone. This also clearly reflects a new form of industrial development in rural economic development that has both "integration" and "points". Here, whether it is agriculture or industry, it seems that each of them is running on the track of modernization, and invisibly transcending the scope of the original village and forming a new pattern of overall rural revitalization in which agriculture and industry complement each other and agriculture and commerce complement each other.
Fourth, the next step of rural revitalization
Here, the most important thing to be clear is that in the development of the countryside, it is not standing still, but with the transformation of the larger world, it is undergoing a change of its own, which is somewhat like the relationship between the earth and the sun, and the rotation of the earth also revolves around the sun. In the cause of developing rural revitalization, the development of the countryside itself and the common process that this development has been brought into the overall development of the world are quite noteworthy. Apparently, the former countryside may have been imagined as a kind of peach blossom-like isolated existence. In an age when water, land, and all kinds of information are not accessible, this self-isolation may exist to a large extent, but at the same time it must be clearly understood that a village is never isolated from the outside world, but is inextricably linked to the outside world, and the countryside can be closed and independent of each other, because it has its own time and space and the livelihood and life there, but it also has its own open space to accept various external influences. The course of change in modern China has gradually grown up in this dialectical development of closure, independence, and open absorption, which seems to be an iron law.
Therefore, from a retrospective point of view, the countryside has a process of continuous self-change, just like the accumulation of the gray soil layer said by archaeology, and the change of age can be observed and conjectured from the accumulation of the gray soil layer. There is obviously a world of difference between the original village and the countryside we see today, but it should be known that the layers of history are still there, and can be excavated in detail through archaeology, which is not squeezed out of the current living world, but reflects a spatial distribution. A village may have opened a farm more than ten years ago, so it attracted outsiders to visit, visit and vacation; but another village, never had the experience of a farm, has been in a state of self-isolation, but by chance, the door of the village opened, directly into an era of the Internet, the village infrastructure is readily available, people use buses between urban and rural areas to pick up and drop off a new generation of tourists, they began to pay no attention to the artificially arranged farmhouse experience of eating, drinking, and living. It is no longer a visit to a farmhouse to try the early adopters, but to have a personalized enjoyment, a natural experience of farmland and mountains compared to the high-rise buildings of the city. Maslow's hierarchy of psychological needs can be concretely reflected here at once, the psychological feeling level of tourists has increased sharply, and the consumption capacity has naturally increased, so that a family from the city stays in the village, lives for a period of time, understands the so-called nature, listens to the sound of nature, which may herald a new kind of rural revitalization horn began to blow the signal, the meaning of this signal is that people are paying more and more attention to their own value at the same time, but also pay attention to the self-worth of emotional experience, This is, of course, a reflection of the holistic values of this era, and emotions have become the most important object of care and attention in this sense. One consequence of the resulting experience is that eating and drinking, which was once the first thing in life, has become no longer a top priority, and the way individuals seek relaxation and alleviate the stress and anxiety of life has become the most worthwhile thing to do in life. In this regard, if the living state of the former can be called the 1.0 version of rural revitalization, then the latter can be described as the 2.0 version of rural revitalization.
The upgrading of this rural development model is obviously inseparable from the improvement of the urban-rural relationship model in this era. This also shows that there is an inevitable interconnection relationship between urban and rural areas, which is like the two ends of a thing connected together, one end changes, and how can the other not change? Two people in a boat, the bow of the ship is shaking, how can the people at the stern not feel the existence of this shaking? In other words, cities have undergone major changes, including real estate development, how can rural society not feel the aftermath of its vibrations strongly? Obviously, the existence of this correlation is ultimately due to the fact that the countryside has never been an airtight tin barrel.
At this point, rural revitalization is to avoid engineering design thinking, but to see it as a natural landscape, with the natural growth of everything in the world and the change of its geographical location and can adapt to people. Therefore, the natural village itself is in flux, and at the same time, because the actions of man have their corresponding changes. Man is also constantly changing himself in the climbing of a ladder of civilization, and man has created a material environment in this world that will enable them to live better, including the invention of tools, technologies and cultures, and man is also bound by this tool, technology and culture, bound and dragged down by it, and it is clear that people have obtained an efficiency and freedom from tools, technology and culture, and they will naturally add another kind of unfreedom brought about by the excessive pursuit of reason and efficiency. Such a relationship between man and nature must also be influencing people's many choices in it, and then become a concept that people have to re-look at the countryside, between the countryside at the beginning of reform and opening up and the appearance of today's countryside, there is no doubt that there has been a huge change, and this change will gradually accumulate, which will bring about a deep cultural transformation of society.
Fifth, the new positioning of rural life based on culture
It can be said that since the end of the 20th century, especially since 2010, one of the biggest changes in Chinese society is that culture is increasingly becoming a legitimate discourse affecting all aspects of people's lives, and people are also unconsciously discovering that culture has become a common consciousness of everyone in this society, which is also fully reflected in people's value planning and identification with the future. In this sense, the countryside is no longer a place of poverty or backwardness that people fear when they think of it, but a place where more primitive cultural displays are labeled, and traditional culture is precisely contained in it, and it is incomparably rich.
People are pursuing a dream life in the countryside like pursuing their own dreams, which is somewhat like a pastoral panorama display. Behind the new terms such as farmhouse rice, farmhouse, rural tourism, slow life, broken away, Buddhist system, green food, pollution-free, etc., which can be seen everywhere, is a deep or even excessive imagination or even an assumption of traditional rural life that thinks it has disappeared. As a result, the concept of a new culture re-enveloped the countryside, giving it a new look before the world. Therefore, rural revitalization is also said to be a kind of cultural revitalization, and it seems that people in the countryside are not so consciously aware or particularly concerned about their own culture, as if bathing in the spring breeze and not knowing what the spring wind really feels. Today's "culture to the countryside" movement, which is blooming everywhere, pursues a kind of cultural propaganda to the people in the countryside from top to bottom, and the popular entertainment method that has been alive in the countryside has been specially screened by the township cultural station and returned to re-"educate" or guide the new life of the new villagers, thus forming a linkage between the upper and lower levels of culture, synergy and expectation of a "chemical reaction" in between.
As a village with its own cultural heritage, in the discourse construction of rural revitalization that we are currently vigorously carrying out, we should consciously place the increasingly aware existence of culture in its proper position. From this kind of cultural consciousness, it is gradually understood that not only a cultural consciousness, but also a cultural positioning, that is, to pay attention to the unique role of culture in leading people to action. Now we have noticed that the grass-roots level in various places is gradually implementing the construction of the "new era of civilization practice" institution (in the county as the center, the township as the station, and the village as the station), which may be accompanied by the revitalization of the countryside and the work of new positioning of rural culture. In this process, practitioners of rural revitalization should perhaps know more clearly and clearly that rural culture is most closely related to the needs of rural farmers. We should also pay special attention to the fact that in the Sanyuan Town Government that we are investigating, there is a special propaganda group for the rural cultural people composed of more than a dozen people, and the peasants themselves have written and performed various forms of literary and artistic programs under the organization of the township cultural station, and these contents have both traditional customs, such as borrowing local folk songs, cross-talk, allegro, and other forms, and compiling some stories that happen around the peasants into their program creation. Then the backbone figures of these rural culture propaganda groups were brought to the village's rural stage to perform for the peasants to see.
This can be described as a kind of recombination between the old and the new, or a grafting effect and chemical reaction produced by the direct contact and collision of local folklore and modern life concepts. In this process, a new relationship between man and earth, man and man, and man and God will inevitably be revealed. In a self-written and self-performed "Group Mouth Xiangsheng" written by Xu Yingzhi, a peasant literary and art creation studio in Shuangtang Village, there is such a passage borrowed from the traditional folk song form, which can be described as a concentrated embodiment of a combination of old and new "new rural love": "Playing with computers in the room of the good sister, the lover in the field." There is a heart to hook lang to farm, and the farmer's computer is not good. The final result was: "I and the lover rushed to yeji and came to the supermarket to buy a mobile phone." In order to match the Mandarin duck as soon as possible, the two sides sent messages to each other. This is a cross-talk written in November 2014, when WeChat has not really been popularized, but computers, mobile phones and short messages have become a must for rural life, and the expression of the rural concept of marriage and love at this time will inevitably be built on top of these new technical means, if you dream of finding the so-called solidified courtship culture of rural culture from a traditional concept and form of marriage and love, it is already unlikely, and there is no longer any trace of existence. Here, the new "lovers" and "good sisters", do not need to date in a specific place, do not need to write a long love letter, send messages to each other with mobile phones can complete the original love process that can only be achieved face to face in a private space, which may be the key to a rural cultural transformation, we need to really pay attention to this dynamic process of change for rural revitalization of a real meaning. For it is only in this grasp of change rather than stillness that we can really see how this new concept can in turn rearrange the life orientation of rural peasant culture.
In general, all of the above is itself a rural culture and its changes that the rural villagers think so and so accept in the current era, and we cannot really interfere with it, which is also a cultural choice of their own, and we do not seem to have the right to blame it, we can only maintain a mentality of understanding, recognize the meaning and value of their cultural existence, and reflect on our own cultural values and significance. At this point, we need to be clearly aware that rural revitalization is not a zombie-like restoration of an extremely rigid tradition that cannot be restored, but to keep pace with the times to notice the new contacts, cooperations, transformations that occur in the process of different stakeholders of rural peasant groups and grass-roots organizations, and a cultural transformation that has been brought about by this transformation, which also really brings about a possibility of rural revitalization and the direction of future development, so it is impossible not to force us to change our attention Maintain a sense of alertness to the changes that are happening around you in the present moment, and maintain a self-alert posture towards the symbols and messages of fleeting rural changes.
(The author is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Society and Population, Chinese Min University, and the rural discovery is transferred from: Journal of Guizhou University (Social Science Edition), No. 4, 2020)
