Author: Qiu Zeqi (Professor, Department of Sociology, Peking University)
Fei Xiaotong (1910-2005) profile picture
Fei Xiaotong, an outstanding scholar with an international reputation in China in the 20th century. He is not only one of the important founders of Chinese sociology, anthropology and ethnology, but also applies what he has learned, combines knowledge with action, and devotes his life to exploring the road of modernization suitable for Chinese culture and social traditions. Throughout his life, Fei Xiaotong served as a scholar, and he never stopped working and writing. "Selected Works of Fei Xiaotong" is to select the most representative works from his many works, all 12 kinds, more than 3 million words, involving rural peasant issues, border area ethnic issues, cultural civilization issues, world observation and other levels. Among them, "Cocoon" is a novella written in English by Fei Xiaotong in 1936, which was translated and published for the first time, providing a rare new dimension for understanding the relationship between Fei Xiaotong's early academic thought and the trend of thought of the times.
As a student, it is always difficult to speak to your own teacher. 2020 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of my teacher, Mr. Fei Xiaotong. Scholars from all walks of life, especially in the academic circles of sociology, anthropology, ethnology, etc., have adopted various ways to express their remembrance of Mr. Wang. But as a student, perhaps my wisdom is not enough, but it is difficult to express. The difficulty is that if I say mr. all kinds of good, people will say, "Can a student not say that the teacher is good?" If I say something bad about my husband, people will say, "Look, his own students say he's not good!" I call this the "student paradox."
Having the "student paradox" doesn't mean we don't need to talk about Mr. Fei fairly. Here, I would like to thank Sanlian Bookstore for publishing the "Selected Works of Fei Xiaotong", which comprehensively presents Mr. Fei's spiritual world and gives me the basis for expression. Based on the "selection" of 12 kinds, I would like to make three points, respond to existing views and opinions, and also express my nostalgia for the teacher.
"Selected Works of Fei Xiaotong" Fei Xiaotong's Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore
1. Re-understanding of "aiming to enrich the people"
People who are familiar with or unfamiliar with Mr. Fei probably know that Mr. Fei summed up his life aspirations into four words: Aiming to enrich the people. A clear picture has always been preserved in my mind, that is, the "Aim to Enrich the People" written by Mr. Li.
If we think that the "rich" of "aiming to enrich the people" only refers to the economy, perhaps we have only seen one side of it. I think that "aiming to enrich the people" can be understood on two levels: the first layer is to change the face of China, and the other layer is to change the face of Chinese. The former is to change the face of poverty in China. "Jiangcun Economy" and "Lucun Farmland" talk about economic life, and "Walking and Re-walking" talks about economic development. In these works, Mr. Fei has a downward-to-upward development idea, advocating that the wealth be hidden in the people. The second layer is to change the backward appearance of the Chinese, which is not talked about by everyone. Backwardness is a broader reference to social development. Among them, the most important refers to backward thinking and backward spirit. Taken together, the "rich" of "aiming to enrich the people" is economically rich on the one hand, and spiritual wealth on the other. I understand that in Mr. Fei's view, the dual wealth of spirit and wealth is the essence of China's transformation from tradition to modernity, and society is an extremely important aspect of it. This pursuit has long been presented in Mr. Fei's "Mr. Xiucai's Prank" when he was 14 years old.
In the midst of spiritual wealth, another meaning of "aiming to enrich the people" is the hope that in the process of "getting rich", China will not become the same as the West, and the relationship between people will become the relationship between people and things. After the 1980s, Mr. Fei repeatedly stressed that China's transition to modernity would require "three levels and two jumps." The first jump was the transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial society. The distribution of Chinese population and resources is extremely uneven, and the eastern region is rich in resources and densely populated; the resources in the central and western regions are relatively poor and the population is relatively scattered and sparse. The non-uniformity of the distribution of population and resources leads to the unevenness between regions in the jump from agricultural to industrial societies. To that end, he proposed two options. The first is to develop rural industry in the eastern region and promote the integration of urban and rural areas; the second is to develop large-scale industries in the central and western regions, especially in the western region, and promote the promotion of urban activities in the countryside. Most people were impressed by Mr. Fei's first plan and ignored his second. In fact, Mr. Fei spent a lot of energy on the second plan, and he took students, including me, to visit many large enterprises and explore the path of large enterprises to drive the rich people in the region.
The second jump is to transform from an industrial society to an information society. In the second jump, there is content of economic prosperity, and more importantly, spiritual wealth. In this regard, Mr. Fei resumed the discussion of Chinese and Western societies, Chinese and Westerners in his early years, from "The Fertility System", "Native China", "Chinese Gentry", "Staying in England" to "The United States and the Americans", placing China and Chinese in a longer history and a larger social pattern, analyzing human culture and civilization, and discussing what to do after China "gets rich". Mr. Fei believes that the differences between China and the West are innate to some extent, and in the leap to the information society, china's encounter with the West, the Chinese and the encounter with Westerners is a world trend and inevitable. That being the case, how can China and Chinese live with themselves and with the West? Mr. Fei asked himself, how can so many people live in peace, get what they want, unite and give full play to the potential of mankind? After ten years, in "Kong Lin Tablets", he gave his own answer, "the beauty of each other, the beauty of beauty, the beauty of the united, the world is the same", advocating the cultural consciousness of all countries in the world.
"Walking and Repeating" fei Xiaotong wrote by Qunyan Publishing House
2. Re-understanding of "useful knowledge"
After 1999, Mr. Fei's works have a big turn, using "Shi Cheng, Make-up Lessons, And Governance" to reflect on his lifelong academic thinking. Many people believe that Mr. Fei gradually clarified his academic position in his later years. I thought that from "Guixing Communication" to "Jiangcun Communication", Mr. Fei was thinking about academic positions. On July 22, 1936, Mr. Fei wrote a small article "Can Academic Research Be Useful", advocating an ideal state of scholarship, that is, "Research comes first, policy comes later, researchers cannot provide correct and detailed facts, and researchers cannot fulfill their responsibilities... We are not afraid that research is useless, but we are afraid that useful research will not be used correctly. Only half a year later, in response to Mr. Lin Yaohua's advocacy of "research for research' sake" in Yanyuan, Mr. Fei clearly swore his academic position. On February 26, 1937, Mr. Fei expressed his mind in "On Social Change Again", "'Research for research's sake' is a talisman for a generation of parasitic scholars. I don't understand 'academic dignity', what I do know is that 'true scholarship' is 'useful knowledge'. Scholarship can be used as an ornament or as food. If I had to choose, I would choose the grain. ”
The idea of "useful knowledge" brings a label to Mr. Fei's scholarship. It is often pointed out that Mr. Fei's academic works are theoretical. In my opinion, the opposite is true. In Mr. Fei's lifelong academic pursuit, the evolution of his theory has a very clear vein, roughly three progressive stages, which can also be understood as three propositions that are undertaken before and after.
The first paragraph is the relationship between economy and society: economic development is based on its original social foundation. In each of his works dealing with economic development, Mr. Fei emphasizes the social basis for economic development. Reading backwards, from "Walking and Repeating" to "Jiangcun Economy" and "Lucun Farmland", we can find that he has never avoided the social environment as the foothold of economic development. Mr. Fei even believes that there is no social basis, and everything else is empty talk. So, what exactly is the basis of society? I summarize it into three dimensions. The first is the livelihood base. The starting point of the "Gangcun Economy" is the basis of livelihood, and "Lucun Farmland" explains the diversity of Chinese livelihoods, ignoring the internal differences in Chinese livelihoods, and ignoring the social basis of economic development. The second is the institutional foundation, the basic organizational framework of society. In traditional China, for example, the emperor was important, and the elite's leadership of society was important. The third is the cultural foundation, if we ignore China's mixed culture with Confucian culture as the axis, and reluctantly compare it with the Western culture with Christian culture as the axis to transform China's culture, it is the origin of wood for fish.
The second paragraph deals with the territorial nature of the social base. Mr. Fei believes that the social foundation, at least in traditional China, is regional, not ethnic. On the surface, "Native China" discusses the social basis of the broad existence in China, and it is also the topic that people talk about and talk about the most. On the surface, I think that "The Pattern of Pluralism and Integration of the Chinese Nation" is Mr. Fei's incisive theory of the regionality of the social foundation. In human society, there are indeed racial differences and ethnic differences. But in China, more importantly, regional resources have shaped regional traditions and cultures. In the extension of history, wars, disasters, diseases, trade, etc. will promote the flow of people in different regions, which will lead to cultural exchanges. Nevertheless, until modern times, regionality was always greater than mobility, and the social foundation in China was still regional.
The third paragraph is that the social integration between regions is a long historical process. I think that Mr. Fei's proposition of the process of social integration is not only an inductive theory of social change, but also a predictive theory, or a theoretical source of "four beautiful sentences". From his early years of "The Relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism" and "The Chicken Foot Toward the Mountain" to the later years of "Pushing Himself and Others" and "Supplementary Lesson Notes: Revisiting Pike Sociology", Mr. Fei uses his life experience as a clue to present the difficulties and processes of different levels of social change. If "The Pattern of Pluralism and Integration of the Chinese Nation" is also a historical presentation of social integration on the basis of the regionality of the social foundation, "Shicheng, Supplementary Lesson, And Governance" strings together the sugar gourds that Mr. Fei pondered on this proposition in different historical periods.
3. The professionalism of intellectuals
Jumping out of Mr. Fei's life aspirations and academic values, another important understanding of Mr. Fei is the tension between his life and academia. From 1991 onwards, I began to follow Mr. Fei around China to investigate until his death, and the closest period of time was also five or six years. In the leisure time of research, sometimes small talk, sometimes playing mahjong, drinking wine, eating fat meat, listening to him tell his own story. Mr. Fei had hoped to tell me systematically about his life, but unfortunately his wish was not fulfilled. In the fragmentary exchanges, I believe that my understanding of Mr. Fei is also fragmentary. In addition to the gap in knowledge, more importantly, I am separated from him by generations, by the realm, and by the understanding of the world. After all, he was an old man of the Three Dynasties, from the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China to the New China, and I was only shallow and had limited insight. After a hundred years, my husband has been able to re-chew some of the words he has said, slowly return to his taste, and understand some of the true meaning.
At the age of 93, Mr. Fei wrote an essay entitled "Exploring the Traditional Boundaries of Extending Sociology." At the beginning of the article, Mr. Fei talked about the tension between science and humanities. He pointed out that sociology has faced a tension from the day of its birth, on the one hand, sociologists must use scientific methods to study society and show the scientific side of sociological knowledge; on the other hand, sociological research cannot exist separately from living people, but also care about human welfare and human beauty, and show the humanistic side of sociology.
I think that this tension is not only sociological, but also Mr. Fei's, and it is what he has been constantly facing all his life. On the one hand, Mr. Fei's life ambitions prompted him to pay attention to society, pay attention to the well-being of the public, and endow him with the spirit of academic humanities; on the other hand, he tried to maintain the spirit of academic science and make contributions to human knowledge in the development of China. I believe that this is the dilemma, entanglement and confusion that he has faced many times in the face of shocks, and it is also a problem that he has not solved in his life.
I also wish to express that Mr. Fei's dilemma is not his personal dilemma, but also the spiritual legacy of Chinese intellectuals. Chinese intellectuals, in fact, have never been professional academics in the individualized sense, always shouldering the burden of home and country, no one without home, no one without a country, no one shouldering the burden of not having a relationship with the fate of the country, not necessarily a mission, but necessarily a responsibility. Such responsibility means that Chinese intellectuals have always shouldered responsibilities outside of themselves as individuals, and Mr. Fei's response to Mr. Lin Yaohua is the best portrayal of this burden. During his doctoral dissertation, he also wrote a novel in English, "Cocoon", which portrayed the daily life of Chinese peasants to readers in the English-speaking world, which is another responsibility. If the Intellectual Man of the West can follow the ego (and of course he will take care of the family), I think a prompt from the Westerner on the plane is a clear metaphor for the relationship between the ego and the home country, that is, you have to live before you can help others. In China, however, Chinese intellectuals are often taught to take the responsibility of their homeland as their responsibility, and they even encourage people to sacrifice their lives to save others, to sacrifice their lives and forget their deaths, and to sacrifice their lives for righteousness. If this is the professional spirit of Mr. Fei's generation of intellectuals, then how can we inherit or even carry it forward? For me, I still have to follow my teacher, Mr. Fei Xiaotong, to break through the cocoon and dance, and to repeat the line.
Guangming Daily ( 2021-01-02 08 edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily