Customer Reviews

From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, A translation of Fei Xiaotong's Xiangtu Zhongguo

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"From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society" by Fei Xiaotong; translated by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng; UC Press, 1992.

In Kansas there are roadside signs bragging that "One Kansas farmer feeds 128 people and you." The efficiency of the American farmer allows over 99 percent of us to pursue other occupations. In China, this sign would read "One Chinese peasant feeds you." About one-half of the Chinese population are rural farmers. More were when this initial sociology was written, originally in essays. Fewer will be farmers over the next decades. But to understand rural China, these essays by China's first sociologist go a long way toward describing the rural roots of over a billion people.

Americans tend to generalize about China with observations that the Chinese believe in responsibility rather than rights, of shame instead of guilt, the long haul rather than short term, or work for the common good rather than for individualistic gain. Yet anyone who has watched B-grade kung fu movies will notice that the allegiance is to a father or grandfather and not to the city or province or state. Western generalizations of Chinese attitudes and beliefs are generally wrong. Fei does a solid job of describing the "differential mode of association" in China, the lack of need for any government at the local rural level, the role of rituals and relationships, and the slow pace of change.

The essays are uneven, and the first two are laden with discussions of the limitations of semantics that make you question if this is a sociology book. Yet the translators stay true to the intent of the author and lay out a sociology of China that is useful for the serious layperson seeking to understand the core of Chinese values that are rooted in rural society, or the junior scholar beginning serious in-depth study and who will hopefully work towards reading advanced material in Chinese.

There is a steady drumbeat of animosity in America toward China that is based on American ignorance towards the culture and language, as well as very poorly educated news reporters who neither speak the language nor understand the history and culture of China. Thus we have heard for the last two decades the imminent threat of the poor rural people rising up against the Party due to the growing income gap between the developed and undeveloped zones. This nonsense is due to a total lack of understanding of the Chinese respect for education; the poor understand they are poor because they lack an education. Local cases of civil unrest today stem from corrupt local officials and local business persons committing local acts of dishonesty. Reading this sociology will go far to help Western reporters and others understand the rural mindset and how local disorder---due to local mismanagement---does not become a threat to the national political structure.

John Richard Schrock

This is a quick read and offers a view of Chinese life for both the novice and the expert.