As an ancient country with a long history and rich cultural tradition, there is no shortage of intellectuals in China's development history. From the so-called Hundred Schools during the Spring and Autumn-Warring States Period, the unification of culture and system in the Qin and Han Dynasties, the rise of the Confucian classics, and the establishment of the civil service system in the Sui Dynasty, to the imperial examination system and the civil service system in the late Qing Dynasty, up to and the establishment of the New Culture Movement and the modern education system during the May 4th Movement, to the reform and opening up of contemporary China, intellectuals have played a unique role and become an important part of China's social economic, historical and cultural changes.
Looking from the angle of the distribution of social space, Chinese intellectuals are divided into rural and official factions. Among these two types of intellectuals, the influence and role of official intellectuals is unique, especially in public opinion which includes classical annals. In the Chinese history, there seemed to be a consensus that the role of the rural intellectuals was being marginalized. In history, the official intellectuals were the dominant ones, and there are also examples of suppressing of rural intellectuals.
There are reasons for this happening. Most of the traditional intellectuals in China are pursuing the ideal of serving the imperial court through official career; in other words, they strive to get into bureaucracy and being the advisor of the emperor is the universal pursuit and ideal of traditional intellectuals. However, from the perspective of intellectuals as a whole, such bureaucratic intellectuals often rise and fall with power and political changes, and not all of them play a significant role. The Cultural Revolution in the last century had dealt a severe blow to the intellectual class in China. Since then Chinese intellectuals, as a class, have almost no independent personality and independent thinking, and their contribution to the development of the country and society is declining, and this is even more obvious in the field of humanities compares with the fields of natural sciences and technology.
China is an agricultural society with a long history; there is not only imperial power, cities, and bureaucracy, but also a wider range of people, villages and the underworld. From a broader perspective, Chinese intellectuals not only assist the rulers within the bureaucracy, nor do they only exist in scholarly institutions and modern universities as elite educators; they also exist in a large scale in rural society and have a realistic and decisive impetus to the Chinese grassroots society, especially the rural society. In fact, China's rural society is under the influence of another class of rural intellectuals, showing the development trajectory and unique characteristic of the country's society; it supports the social development as the core force of the social organization.
In traditional Chinese rural governance, intellectuals played a crucial role. There had been a group of intellectuals, who were not in the ranks of officials, and they did not have the ambition to become renowned scholars but instead, they sought to educate civilians. They considered aiding the rural areas as their responsibility, with a clear and firm sense of home and country identity, a sense of historic mission to educate the people to change their customs; their scholarly style was humble and straightforward, they went deep into the people to educate them in the traditional Chinese countryside; this has a profound impact on the governance and development of rural areas. A typical example of such intellectual groups was the Taizhou School, which had been developed gradually in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.
China's traditional rural organization system was rather unique, and it was mainly maintained by the rural intellectuals. They specifically strengthened governance through genealogy, ancestral halls, coffin depositories, local scholarly organizations, and local schools, providing social security and social relief, strengthening rural education and moral and ethical constraints, and when the imperial power could not reach the rural parts, their effective management of grassroots rural communities had been achieved, and the social cohesion of large-scale rural areas had been improved. The thinkers and practitioners of the Taizhou School had participated extensively in the concrete practice of rural governance, and had disseminated the essence of traditional Confucian thoughts to specific rural governance mechanisms, which had an important impact on the harmony, stability, and development of the local societies.
The rural education practices of the Taizhou school intellectuals had a great influence on Republican scholars like Liang Shuming. During the Republican Era, the traditional rural governance collapsed, scholars like Liang Shuming and Yan Yangchu their rural construction, with the goal of saving the ruined countryside physically and spiritually. However, their efforts could not salvage the situation and unable to reverse the reality of the gradual decline of the rural areas during the Republican Era.
Then, among the official and the rural intellectuals, which one is the mainstream? The real answer may be not what is usually expected. Anbound’s tracking research shows that the rural intellectuals are the true mainstream and main body of Chinese intellectuals.
Taking the Ming Dynasty as an example, the competition in the township official examination was fierce, far exceeding that of the college entrance examination today. The proportion of the scholars in the Ming Dynasty passing the local examination was mostly 30:1, and the passing rate was about 3.3%, which means that up to 96.7% of Chinese intellectuals were not among the official bureaucracy. The proportion of Chinese scholars passing the higher level of the examination was 20:1, with the rate of about 5%, and the intellectuals not being in the officialdom was also 95%. Since the rural intellectuals were the majority, then, why did the public opinion, annals and prestige only mention mostly the official intellectuals?
The main reason is the privilege of intellectuals.
In the traditional Chinese political system, scholars enjoyed certain political and economic preferences. They received the meal allowance, which could more or less sustain the family's livelihood, and they were also exempted from servitude. In terms of social status, scholars were widely respected, and commoners could not sit on the same level as them. During the Ming Dynasty, even the prime minister did not dare to accept scholars paying respect to them. In other words, the annals of history are controlled by the official intellectuals. Although the rural intellectuals were doing practical things, they were only mentioned in unofficial history.
Statesmen during the Qing Dynasty like Zuo Zongtang and Zeng Guofan were examples of the rural intellectuals. Zuo Zongtang remained unhappy in his older days because he did not receive the status of an official intellectual, and he was opposed by the official intellectuals; in the end this was settled when the emperor declared him to have the same “position as an official intellectual”. Zeng Guofan’s situation was slightly better than Zuo Zongtang’s, but he was also merely declared to be “the same position as official intellectual”
Therefore, the dispute between the two factions of Chinese intellectuals has existed since the ancient times, and its significance is particularly important today. Rural governance in China is now a major problem. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, due to the high political mobilization ability of the Communist Party of China, from 1949 to 1978, China realized what had not been realized in the past two thousand years, that is maximizing the mobilization of the peasants in China, and making their national consciousness. Professor Wang Shuguang of Peking University believes that the enhancement of national mobilization ability has, in turn disintegrated the inherent social governance mechanism of China, which also led to the weakening of national political mobilization and the reduction of national institutional penetration after 1978. Afterward, there was a large number of vacuum zones for rural governance in the countryside, as the rural areas faced “double disintegration”. On the one hand, the local social governance system has disappeared; on the other hand, the embedded rural governance that relied on national mobilization ability did not exist. With the advent and rapid expansion of China's urbanization and industrial processes, rural governance and rural development have become more passive.
40 years after China’s reform and opening up, the central government put forward the strategy of revitalizing the rural areas and hoped to revitalize the industries, talents, culture, ecology, and organizations. The current rural revitalization strategy has multiple objectives. First, it hopes to solve various problems caused by “incomplete urbanization”, such as household registration restrictions and narrow the gap between urban and rural areas. Second, it aims to solve the problem of rural poverty to achieve a comprehensive well-off society and stabilize the rural areas which are essential for China’s politics. The third is to expand China's domestic market space through rural construction and comprehensive development.
With the collapse of the rural governance system and the decline of the rural areas, the rural revitalization faces the lack of various aspects, from policy to means, talent to resources, technology to finance. Most importantly, it lacks talents. During field survey, Anbound found out that there is a special group that plays a unique role in rural development, stability and prosperity; this group is Chinese rural intellectuals.
There is a village called Zhengjiazhuang in Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province. The village has 125 households with 525 people, which comprises of seven ethnic groups, namely Han, Tibetan, Bai, Yi, Naxi, Yi and Yi, a perfect example of a typical multi-ethnic settlement. The economic income of Zhengjiazhuang is mainly based on the marketing of Chinese herbal medicines, husbandries like as pigs, cattle and tobacco, rice, and cultivation of crops such as broad beans and barley. The villagers here are busy with agriculture and leisure, and they have different religious beliefs and different ethnic customs, but they can live together harmoniously. This is a stable rural area in terms of population and society. In 2015, Zhengjiazhuang was awarded the title of the 4th National Civilized Village and Town by the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization.
The development of Zhengjiazhuang has a lot to do with the leadership of the village party secretary He Guoxiang. He Guoxiang is an ethnic Tibetan and knows Tibetan medicine. In the 1980s, he began to engage in the marketing of herbal medicines and became rich. Since then, as the secretary of the party branch, he helped the villagers to master the marketing knowledge of herbal medicines. Under his leadership, the marketing team has gradually grown, and some villagers gradually became rich as well. At the same time, he actively participated in the village organization. Under his leadership, the whole village implemented a new rural garbage management model; the rate of the villagers paying the garbage management fee, and the timely handling of the garbage has reached 100%.
In many reports on Zhengjiazhuang, the village party secretary He Guoxiang was classified as a “base-level capable person”. However, the term "capable person" is not sufficient to explain the role of He Guoxiang. In fact, He Guoxiang is a representative of the capable rural intellectual. He has the knowledge in Tibetan medicine and marketing, as well as the ability to think about rural governance and management. The example of Zhengjiazhuang shows that if their knowledge can be fully applied to rural development, it is often more effective than the intervention and management by central and local governments. More importantly, the rural intellectuals not only promote the development of the rural economy, but also improve the rural governance, stabilize the rural society, retain the rural form, and ultimately promote the comprehensive development of rural society to a harmonious society. Isn't this the goal that the rural revitalization strategy is expected to achieve?
Final Analysis Conclusion:
In China today, the understanding of intellectuals should not only focus on official intellectuals, rather the power of the rural intellectuals should be understood; they constitute the majority of Chinese intellectuals. Even in the history, Confucius was a wandering rural intellectual most of the time as well. From the perspective of the role of China's grassroots society, only the intellectuals in the rural areas will often play a more important role in the development of China's vast rural society. Therefore, the role of rural intellectuals and the cultivation of rural intellectuals should be the most important link in China's "rural revitalization" strategy.
