What a dexterous organization society is, and where can it stand up to hard-footed attempts? If the knowledge of the general population is not sufficient to maintain a new system, sooner or later it will degenerate.
--Fei Xiaotong
Mr. Fei Xiaotong was born on November 2, 1910, to a family of intellectuals in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province (now Wujiang District, Suzhou). Two days ago was the 107th anniversary of his death.
Who is Fei Xiaotong? Politically, he has served as vice chairman of the National People's Congress, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and academically, he is one of the founders of Chinese sociology and anthropology.
In 1939, at the age of 29, Fei Xiaotong published the English edition of the book "Gangchon Economy", which was later regarded as the foundation of Chinese genre.
Regarding this book, Teacher Wu wrote in a small article recalling Mr. Fei Xiaotong two years ago:
The trigger for this book is a heartbreaking tragedy of youth. Just four years ago, in the autumn of 1935, Fei Xiaotong, a student of the Department of Sociology of Yenching University, and his new wife Wang Tonghui went to the Dayao Mountains in Guangxi to do field investigations of Yao villages. In the spring of the following year, in order to heal the wounds and peacefully care for the pain of his wife, Fei Xiaotong came to the Kaixian Bow Village where his sister Fei Dasheng lived, where he began a meticulous fieldwork with a broken young heart on crutches, and "Gangcun Economy" was the result. …… Fei Xiaotong's observation is beyond all his contemporaries, not only in China, but even in the global academic community, it is completely different from Adam Smith and Ricardo's large-scale industrial vision, but a kind of economic thought inspiration from China. In fact, it was from here that China's economic reform, which began in 1978, was made by township enterprises as an "unexpected" breakthrough.
Fei Xiaotong's life has witnessed the changes in China in the past century. In the book "Native China", which was later published, he used his own civilian perspective to describe the changes in The cultural form of Chinese society under the farming culture.
Why do Chinese pay so much attention to the order of the elderly and the young? Why is it so difficult to leave the homeland and return to the roots? Why does friendship value relationships over rights and contracts? These questions, in Fei Xiaotong's pen, have the most true and unique interpretation. Therefore, it is often said that if you have not read the three books of "Jiangcun Economy", "Native China" and "Fertility System", it is equivalent to not understanding the most real China.
In April 2005, Fei Xiaotong died at the age of 94. Ended his life of ups and downs, entanglements and glory.
Today, 12 years later, we still miss this "academic hero", and still regard his young works as classics and read them over and over again. In the eyes of Teacher Wu, he is the first economist in the world to point out that the countryside can also develop the industrial economy; in the eyes of another "literary master" Wang Xiaobo, Fei Xiaotong is one of the most honest writers in academia.
Honesty and Hustle (Excerpt)
When I was an undergraduate, my brother was in graduate school. I studied science, and my brother studied logic. Once I asked him: In your opinion, which of the scientific works written by Chinese is the most worth reading? He replied without hesitation: Fei Xiaotong's "Jiangcun Economy". Now, if a young man asks me this question, no matter what he studied, my answer is still "Gangchon Economy" - but I think the name of the book is still "The Life of Chinese Peasants".
Its strength lies in its very honest description of the scene of life in the countryside of Jiangnan, and such an honesty has never been seen in the books written by Chinese. Mr. Li Jinghan, who is also a senior in the field of sociology, has done a "Survey of Dingxian County" to make the situation of a county clear. Sociologists should always read the Dingxian Survey—but if you don't study sociology, I think you can skip the Dingxian Survey, but you can't do it without reading the Gangcun Economy.
Today's Gangchon
There is a problem among Chinese readers, who always turn a blind eye to certain facts, including the life of Chinese peasants. What readers like to do is to bury their heads in the pile of old paper, as if there is everything in the old paper. Chinese texts are vast, but if no one writes the facts on paper, there is still nothing on paper. The value of Gangchon Economy is that it puts the facts on paper, and few people in this part of China do such things. Malinowski prefaced Gangchon Economy and praised Mr. Fei's honesty. Therefore, the degree of honesty in Mr. Fei's research has reached the international advanced level.
The main thrust of this article is not to talk about "Gangchon Economy", but to talk about honesty. In my opinion, honesty is like gold, with a difference in color. Take Mr. Fei's book, for example, when published overseas, called "The Life of Chinese Peasants", which is completely pure gold honesty. When it was published in China, it was called "Jiangcun Economy", and the color was a little worse, although it was still honest and more chinese literati tasted. We have a tradition here that is very bad for complete honesty.
Some people say that Zhu Xi's old master has never been clear about what is called "be" and what is called "should be". We know that there is a difference between the former referring to facts and the latter to will. It is impossible for a person to encounter all the things that are satisfactory in his life, and if Zhu Fuzi always confuses will with facts, then how will he live. Therefore, when Zhu Fuzi began to think academically, he regarded willingness and facts as the same thing—academic thinking does have such a characteristic, and when it is not studied, will and reality can be separated again.
Fei Xiaotong was reading the newspaper
Not only Zhu Fuzi, but Chinese when doing learning. From the time of Confucius to the present, when writing articles, we must take a lot of energy to discuss such a big topic as the national economy and the people's livelihood and even the future of mankind, and come to a bright conclusion. It is good to draw a bright conclusion on all major topics, but it is difficult to do without confusing will with reality.
Man's faithfulness to known facts is called honesty, and disloyalty to facts is called hypocrisy. There are also those who are only faithful to the facts of the choice, which is neither honest nor hypocritical, which I call extravagant. This is an implicit statement, which at first glance does not seem appropriate, but in fact it is still reasonable: people always choose facts out of a pompous state of mind.
Once, I read a collection of essays by an overseas Neo-Confucian scholar (I have no prejudice against overseas Neo-Confucianism, just an example), and the author cited the east and the west, from Max Weber to the "root-seeking literature" of modern black Americans, and the examples were not very appropriate, and he did not really cite the examples that should be quoted. The more I read it, the more I didn't understand it, so I was furious, and I had to understand it. In the end, I saw an article in taipei in which he answered a reporter's question and linked his own study of governance to the "cultural construction" of the Taiwan authorities -- seeing this, I can see it clearly.
I also know that the Taiwan authorities are not counting the cost of work in attracting overseas scholars, and this is the cause of the arrogance -- of course, the farther causes can be traced back to the imperial examination and the Eight Strands of Literature, and if people regard learning as the original of entering the body, their hearts will float upwards. Honesty is not the strength of academia, because being too honest is not academic. The kind of honesty that Mr. Fei showed in "Gangchon Economy" is indeed rare. A foreign reporter asked Mr. Fei: How long do you think it will take for China to produce another Fei Xiaotong? He answered: Fifty years. I really don't want to believe this, but I'm afraid I will have to believe it in the end.
*This article is excerpted from the book "My Spiritual Homeland" published by The New Classics in November, written by Wang Xiaobo.