The Paper's reporter Jiang Ziwen intern Yang Na
Recently, the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) reported that Xiao Qinghe, currently an associate professor in the Department of History at Shanghai University and deputy director of the Research Center for Religion and Chinese Society, and the afterword to his 2009 doctoral dissertation have aroused public attention. In the afterword, he recounted that he was originally a cowherd, starting from a small mountain village in Qianshan, Anhui Province, and finally being admitted to Peking University.
Xiao Qinghe's story has once again triggered a discussion among netizens about whether the cold door can produce a noble son. Similar to Xiao Qinghe, Huang Guoping, who graduated from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017, also recalled his experience of how he got out of the small mountain pass and fought against fate all the way through his thesis, which touched a large number of netizens.
The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) noted that in the discussion on the Internet about "whether the cold door can produce a noble son", a paper written by Professor Dong Haijun, who is currently the deputy dean of the School of Public Administration of Central South University and the director of the Social Survey and Public Opinion Research Center of Central South University, "The Drive and Opportunity of Growth: The Self-Ethnography of the Suffering Experience of the Bottom" entered the public eye.
In the paper, the sociology professor takes the self as the object of study, adopts the form of self-narrative from the perspective of the main position, focuses on his own life experience, starts from his own personal life, pays attention to his emotions, thoughts and emotions, and then answers the question of "whether the cold door can produce a noble son" through personal ethnography.
Dong Haijun believes in the paper that in the context of the bottom family, the hardships of material restrictions, the family's common instructions and the discipline of physical labor can stimulate the desire of the cold children to flow upwards, obtain the growth character by controlling their time use, mental tempering and empathy understanding, accept the influence of community culture and the challenge of structural situation, and jointly drive the promotion of the cold children to achieve class mobility across the original life world.
The paper was published in the core and CSSCI journal of Peking University, China Youth Studies, No. 7, 2019, and the author Dong Haijun is also a researcher at the Hunan Provincial Women's and Children's Health and Development Research Center, and the paper is also regarded as a phased result of the major project of the Hunan Provincial Women's Federation in 2018 (project number: 18zda01).
According to the official website of Central South University, Dong Haijun graduated from Hunan University of Science and Technology (Xiangtan Normal College) with a bachelor's degree in ideological and political education in 2001, a master's degree in sociology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2004, and a doctorate in sociology from Nanjing University in 2007.
After graduating with his Ph.D., Dong Haijun joined the Department of Sociology at the Law School of Central South University as an associate professor in June 2007, and two years later became the deputy director and associate professor of the Sociology Department of the School of Public Administration, and engaged in postdoctoral research at the School of Business. During this period, from August 2013 to August 2014, he went to Datun Town, Pei County, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, to serve as the deputy secretary of the Party Committee, and from September 2014 to September 2015, he was sent by the state to study at Texas A&M University in the United States. Since September 2015, Dong Haijun has been a professor in the Department of Sociology at the School of Public Administration.
In the above paper, Dong Haijun discussed in chapters "Family Background: Poor Bottom Families Due to Illness", "Growth Efficiency of Low-level Labor in Cold Life", and "Environmental Cultural Influence and Structural Opportunities". Among them, the author also analyzes the "growth efficiency of the low-level labor of the cold door" from three aspects: "the difficult struggle of material restrictions", "the common instructions of the family", and "the discipline of physical labor".
Dong Haijun wrote in the article: "From the family background, some people are young and arrogant, but some people have a golden spoon in their mouths. I thought I was born in the late 1970s to an ordinary rural family in Hengnan, Hunan Province, about an hour's walk from the town, about 10 kilometers from the road. My brothers, my grandparents and uncle who were not married lived together, and when I was in junior high school, my older uncle ran away from home and has not been heard from so far. Except for his father," who went to junior high school, the elders of the family 'don't know a basket of big characters' and basically did not go to school. Her mother was frail and sickly, but her father was tall and capable, and in the 1980s he built the first five-room red brick house in the production team, and worked as a small foreman, and began to take young farmers to Hengyang City to do work. But the good times are not long, when I was six or seven years old, perhaps because of overwork, my father suddenly suffered from cerebral hemorrhage at home, and was revived by hospital rescue, but he fell behind, memory function decline, forgetfulness is more serious, and it is no longer advisable to go out to work. The family was poor due to illness, so they had to guard a few acres of thin fields in the countryside to survive. ”
Such an economic foundation also determines Dong Haijun's frugal living habits, he remembers: "When I applied for a hardship allowance in college, I used a sentence in extremely complicated realism: The only electrical appliance in my home is the light bulb. It wasn't until I bought a TV set for my family on my PhD earnings on my PhD. Of course, what is not reported in the application is that in order to save electricity costs, the power of the light bulb is still extremely low, in addition to the 100-watt light bulb used outside the hall house during the Spring Festival, it is generally a 5-watt light bulb, or hung in the upper corner of the door in the middle of the two rooms, in order to achieve a light bulb to illuminate the two rooms. ”
Dong Haijun analyzed, "parents can not go out to enjoy the migrant economy due to physical reasons, my family's economic resources mainly rely on family farming, and its efficiency is very low, the response is nothing more than to carry out inward-scale labor and additional lease of rice fields circulated by villagers, in short, more labor is needed." My brother and I naturally became the main labor force on the bench. Looking back now, I have a bit of an after-the-fact analysis that the hardships under the material constraints of the cold door life, the family's common instructions and the discipline of physical labor have promoted the formation of personal independence, self-discipline, tenacity, responsibility, thriftiness and maturity, driving me to control my own time use, temper my mind and empathize with society, and achieve class mobility across the original life world. ”
When reviewing the family instructions of his father and grandparents, he also mentioned, "Family situation and labor made me realize very early that reading was basically the only way for me to get out of the bottom personally." There is no other temptation in the mountain village, and the temptation to read and jump out of the farm is the most driven. ”
In Dong Haijun's view, "In the cold door situation, how the children choose to behave, there is a subjective process. There are many behavioral options for facing a dilemma. Attributing difficulties to society alone may be either extroverted and anti-social, or introverted and depressed, or passively indulged in sound and color dogs and horses, and in the countryside, it is addicted to gambling. If the plight is attributed to the conditions of the village alone, it may go with the flow, or advocate the transformation of the village or go out to work. If you attribute the plight to the family or the individual alone, it is likely to transform yourself to find upward mobility opportunities. ”
"On the other hand, the opportunities provided by social structures have an important impact on personal growth. Social structure theory has always emphasized the impact of macro social structure on individuals, the most important point of which is the structural opportunities that individuals can obtain or access, just as the system of restoring the college entrance examination is set to provide people with upward opportunities that profoundly affect social mobility, and deeply affect the development of individuals. ”
In Dong Haijun's successful study and employment experience, there is no lack of accidental "yin and yang errors": "Before the first half of the 1990s, secondary school graduates could 'package work distribution', while the proportion of high school students who could be admitted to college was very low, and the uncertainty was very large. Therefore, the first choice of outstanding junior high school students is to apply for secondary school. Junior high school students who are very diligent and intelligent in their studies, if they are admitted to secondary school, are assigned to work in township or county units after graduation. However, due to the unsatisfactory results of the middle school entrance examination, I missed the secondary school and entered the provincial key high school county no. 1 Middle School. ”
At the end of the paper, Dong Haijun concluded, "In general, individual success is embedded in individual efforts and opportunities in the structure of the times, and is determined by the combined influence of multiple factors. The same is true of the growth of the children of the cold door, and their personal efforts are more important and meaningful. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Yuhao Zhong
Proofreader: Liu Wei