In the thought of Professor Fei Xiaotong, a social anthropologist, society and culture are mutually integrated. Throughout Fei Xiaotong's academic activities throughout his life, the two main lines running through all his works and academic activities are society and culture. This is his exploration of China's social development from his initial mind of solving "the basic problems of China's rural areas" in the early 1930s, and this exploration runs through his life; From the thinking of "the cultural variation of the Chinese nation", to the thought of forming "the pattern of pluralism and integration of the Chinese nation", and the maxim of "beauty of every beauty, beauty of beauty, beauty and common, and great harmony in the world" formed on this basis; The academic practice from "Jiangcun economy" to "aiming at enriching the people" can be regarded as two basic threads of Fei Xiaotong's academic thought.
"Small towns, big problems" is actually practicing the socio-economic concept of "aiming at enriching the people"
The study of small towns was initiated from the study of rural areas. In Fei Xiaotong's view, it is of great significance to rural development. It is "a bottle mouth in the whole rural development strategy". The significance of "small towns and big problems" is not that it reveals the characteristics of China's urbanization, but that it plays a role in rural development and urban-rural relations. "Workers and peasants complement each other" and "no work, no wealth" can almost be said to be a simple summary of Fei Xiaotong's first ideological thread.
There is no doubt that Fei Xiaotong's main line of thought was formed during his decades of inspection of China. It seems that just seeing this point is not enough to explain why he will unswervingly adhere to this point and grasp his social outlook. One of the criticisms of the development of township industries and small towns is that their economies of scale are too low. In fact, township industries and small towns are indeed lower than large industries and metropolises in terms of economic agglomeration and economies of scale. The size of benefits is determined by people's judgments of objective facts, and the pursuit of benefit types depends on people's value judgments, that is, people's social outlook.
Fei Xiaotong called his view of benefit "socio-economic view" to distinguish it from the economic view of purely pursuing economic benefits. In the 1980s, his basic view on the benefits of township enterprises was that the development of small industry in rural China was much more meaningful than simple economic growth. In addition to solving China's livelihood problems and promoting the development of industrialization, rural industry is also changing the traditional nature and structure of contemporary society, People have begun to change their thoughts and attitudes. Therefore, he does not advocate only economic accounts, but general accounts, which is far more complicated than economic accounts alone. In fact, what he called the general ledger is to treat the development of township enterprises and small towns from the perspective of comprehensive economic and social benefits. His adherence to the concept of economic benefits is related to his views on people. In this way, Fei Xiaotong's main idea of China's development perspective extends to the meaning and purpose of human beings - "remember the meaning and final purpose of human beings". In fact, he also analyzed rural industry and small towns from the perspective of what is usually called "development" - social development should regard people as a whole with multiple aspects according to the purpose of human beings, and they live in the natural, economic, social and cultural environment at the same time. People are integrated with nature, economy, society and culture, and we must always adhere to the people centered development idea.
Exploring the Cultural Concept Formed in the Process of "the Pluralistic Integration Pattern of the Chinese Nation"
Since 1950, he has turned to the study of Chinese ethnic issues. Judging from his published works, "China is a unified multi-ethnic country" is his basic judgment on the characteristics of the Chinese nation. In his view, the unity of the Chinese nation is attributed to its long history of culture and cultural conflict and integration. He wrote: "From the historical knowledge that we have now, there were primitive humans living on the land of our country at the latest 500000 years ago... In the earliest written records, it can be seen that people who lived together at that time formed different groups. They also had different names. In the historical records, there were constant flows, wars and mixtures of these groups." He tried to explain the historical integration process of the Chinese nation from the historical textual research. There is no doubt that the "pattern of pluralistic integration of the Chinese nation" has had a significant impact on the study of Chinese ethnology. It is worth noting that this idea, which had been brewing for a long time in Fei Xiaotong's thought, had already influenced Fei Xiaotong himself before it was formally put forward. Without this, it is difficult to deeply understand his later ideas of "border area development" and "the whole country playing chess".
Fei Xiaotong extended his thought of "aiming at enriching the people" to the specific development path of ethnic minorities and combined it, and confirmed that "the economic development of ethnic minority areas must be the development of ethnic minorities". These include the development of industries suitable for local conditions and economic development with the support of the Han people and the "participation" of ethnic minorities. Here, we have seen that the main line of his thought of "multiple integration pattern" has begun to merge with the idea of "no work, no wealth" and "agriculture and industry supplement each other". In the depth of this fusion, I saw that he tried to realize "the meaning and ultimate goal of mankind itself" through modernization.
Why Fei Xiaotong Can Integrate Society and Culture
In his article Modernization of China and the Development of Ethnic Minorities, Fei Xiaotong understood modernization as the use of advanced science and technology to promote production, improve social productivity, and thus promote the development of society and culture. Obviously, in his understanding of modernization, the purpose of economic development is to promote social and cultural development. Economy is not an end, but social and cultural development is the end. This social and human centered modernization concept (or development concept) led him to combine various economic and non economic goals according to the changes of human civilization and individual social needs in his research on China's social development, such as the research on small towns and border area development. Secondly, he analyzed the development of various regions from a holistic and unified perspective to coordinate the micro and macro social structures. Thirdly, he tried to explain the rationality of people's spatial development in regional layout.
Fei Xiaotong's significance for China's modernization exploration lies in that when people debate and clarify the connotation of the new development concept, he has been exploring how a backward, multicultural country can move towards modernization. People can understand the true meaning of Fei Xiaotong's thought only through his views of "aiming at enriching the people" and "the pattern of pluralistic integration of the Chinese nation".
As a social anthropologist, Fei Xiaotong has more profound feelings about the role of culture than others, which is a deep understanding of society. Reading Fei Xiaotong's works in his later years, culture is the core of his thinking. In Fei Xiaotong's works, the concepts of society and culture are used alternately. However, Fei Xiaotong has a profound thinking about the culture as the core of "society". Human socialization is a process of cultural inheritance. Through cultural inheritance, human beings have realized the continuity of society from generation to generation.
In 1992, at the commemoration meeting of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Sociology of Peking University, Fei Xiaotong extended the relationship between society and culture from the construction of a moderately prosperous society in China: "The road to a moderately prosperous society is clear now, but I have realized that we must think more about how we should go after a moderately prosperous society. The change of the relationship between man and nature after the well-off society will inevitably lead to the change of the relationship between people and the problem of how people get along with each other. " When further talking about the relationship between people, he used a new concept, that is, the psychological relationship of people. Since then, social problems have entered the cultural field and become a cultural problem, which is so simple.
Fei Xiaotong was able to integrate society and culture because he started from solving practical problems. In this way, the vision will be much broader both in terms of ideas and methods. As Fei Xiaotong said in the 1930s, knowledge is useful knowledge.
[The author Ding Yuanzhu is a professor of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee (National School of Administration)]
