Did Village Communities Exist in Traditional China:Revisiting a Half-century-long Academic Controversy
In the 1940s,Japanese scholars conducted heated debates on the existence of village communities in China based on their surveys of Chinese rural villages,which lasted for half a century.While there was academic value in applying community theory to summarize the surveys at that time,there were limitations due to their simplistic understanding of community theory and straightforward conclusions based on insufficient facts.Therefore,it is necessary to understand the richness and dynamism of community theory from the relationship between the individual and the whole and its changing dimensions based on an in-depth understanding of the classical community theory.These include the multidimensionality in defining the community concept,the diversity of the community forms,the dynamism possessed by the community,the action in constructing the community,the governance created by the community,and the target realized by the community.Through the"In-depth China Survey"launched in 2015,we can find that the social and community forms of Chinese villages are characterized by richness,evolution,and imbalance.The lower the degree of social differentiation,the higher the natural attributes of the community;the higher the degree of social differentiation,the stronger the artificially constructed attributes of the community.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
