How to reconstruct the interpersonal and order in the countryside? What is the direction of the countryside in the great change

New rural philanthropy encounters old logic

Near the Spring Festival, I received a phone call from the old principal of the town central primary school, inviting me to attend the 2015 Spring Festival Fellowship and Education Fund Council of the town on the fourth day of the first lunar month. Almost all the directors of the foundation are rich people in the town, and the amount of donations is in the tens of thousands of yuan. As one of the few PhDs in this town and who teaches at the university, I have to be invited to attend the meeting, which is not a director.

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The Education Foundation, established in 2011, is the first township-level education foundation in the county. Its funds are mainly used for the town's scholarship, rewards for students who have been admitted to key high schools or universities in recent years, and subsidies for teachers to make up lessons. Since its establishment, the operation of the foundation has been gradually on the right track, the account is independent, and the articles of association are gradually improved and standardized. However, the foundation has encountered a bottleneck in its development. The fund has not been able to expand its capacity, and the participation enthusiasm of the township sages has not increased but decreased. During the Spring Festival in 2014, only eight people attended, of which only half of the directors of the foundation came, and the director was unable to attend. This year, the secretary and mayor of the town contacted the directors personally and asked the village cadres to mobilize the "new rich" who have emerged in recent years to participate in the gathering in 2015 to expand the fund capacity of the foundation. As a result, the number of people present this year reached 33, and the invitees were mainly entrepreneurs and cadres at or above the department level. The meeting was presided over by the town secretary and the town mayor, during which the county magistrate also came to support it. Under the mobilization of many parties, some entrepreneurs decided to renew their donations on the spot, while others remained silent, some were called in public to express their wishes, and some left the meeting quietly. The donated funds on the spot reached 690000 yuan.

It should be said that the establishment of an education foundation is a good thing and is conducive to the training of talents in his hometown. However, as a first-time participant, the author found two interesting phenomena: first, there is a big difference between the participants and the previous organizers, and some people who are enthusiastic about public welfare in the village did not participate; second, some people donated a lot of money to the public welfare undertakings in the village, but the amount of donation to the township education foundation is not high. Why is that?

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In this donation activity of the Township Education Foundation, village cadres mobilized one of my uncles many times, but they were politely refused. My uncle went to Shanghai as early as the late 1990s. Although he was not very rich, he also accumulated considerable wealth. In recent years, he has done a lot of good deeds in his hometown: he has built a house for his poor brother for free; every year when he comes home, he will give money and gifts to the elderly in his family; while the author is in school, he has offered to subsidize it many times; as soon as he heard that the ancestral house would be built in the village this year, he first promised to donate 10,000 yuan. The villagers in the village were full of praise for his enthusiasm for the family's public welfare and his generosity in supporting the members of the family. However, he is unwilling to participate in the activities of the township education foundation. "I know that to go is to donate money," he said. "I'm not very interested. If I have the ability, I can help my family do something. How can I care so much about anything else?"

Another villager, who has been engaged in the construction industry for many years, has a family fortune of tens of millions. In 2011, he donated 30,000 yuan to the foundation and was one of the first directors of the township education foundation. At this year's conference, without saying a word, he quickly left the venue and did not attend the luncheon after being named and donated 10,000 yuan by the host. It can be seen that his enthusiasm for donating money is not high. But as early as a few years ago, he alone donated more than 100,000 yuan for the construction of roads in the village. This year, he plans to build six new conjoined villas in his hometown, costing about 3 million yuan. Three of them are for his three brothers, and the other three are for his three uncles. With the exception of one of his own brothers, other people do not have the ability to build villas, but he promised that as long as others contribute 100000, he will cover all the funding shortfalls. Obviously, for him, it is also public welfare, family affairs are more important than village affairs, and village affairs are more important than township affairs.

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In fact, this logic of rural philanthropy is also the logic of most Chinese rich people doing charity, expanding from their own to their families, from their families to their acquaintances, and extrapolating layer by layer. In a nutshell, this is a logic from small private to big private and then to small public and archduke. This logic is still apt to be described by Mr. Fei Xiaotong's "differential order pattern". Mr. Fei believes that Chinese interpersonal relationships are self-centered, dividing them into closeness by distance and recent times, just like pebbles are thrown into the water, and the ripples on the surface of the water extend outward from the center, circle by circle. This can explain why many villagers are keen on doing good deeds in their families and villages, but not so enthusiastic about the wider range of charities.

Compared with the philanthropy in western countries, the philanthropic logic of Chinese "differential order pattern" is often criticized as the lack of great love and archduke. However, in essence, this difference between China and the West is only the difference in the cultural soil generated by charity. China is traditionally an "ethics-based" society. For a long time, when most farmers needed help most, they mainly relied on the help of family members and villagers, and those who came out of the countryside often relied on the assistance provided by their families and villagers. In this way, if these people can return home in the future, they will naturally have more feelings for their families and hometown.

As far as I am concerned, when I was in college, before leaving, all the elders of the family came to see them off, some took some eggs, some took some fruit, and some gave dozens or hundreds of yuan. This tender picture is still fresh in my mind today. If someone asks me that there are two children in need of help, one is in the family, the other is in a remote area, your ability can only help one, who do you choose? Intellectually, I also know that children in remote mountain areas also need help, but emotionally, I will not hesitate to favor the members of my own family. In fact, if everyone can do "easy public welfare" from the side, even if the family starts to do charity, isn't it also a kind of positive energy? (Chen Feng)

Part-time work and part-time farming: the self-balance of Peasant families

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When I returned to my hometown for the Spring Festival this time, there were several new buildings in the village. Young people all go out to work, so the responsibility of building houses is of course borne by the elderly. I can't help feeling that the old people in the countryside are really busy, not only farming and raising children, but also building houses. Almost every household in the village has built buildings, with two floors low and four or five storeys high. To build such a building, it will cost at least 200000, and as many as four or five hundred thousand. Building a house is a major event for every family in the countryside. Building a house, marrying a wife and having children are the three major tasks of life. A young family can live a comfortable life only when it has a house and a small family of its own. Nowadays, if young men in rural areas want to get married, buildings are a necessary condition. Girls with good conditions require not only buildings in the countryside, but also commercial houses in the city.

Uncle Kikyo, 64 years old, is an old carpenter in the countryside. he is skillful in craftsmanship, and he can draw, carve and write calligraphy. he has brought nearly 20 apprentices. He said that he had built three houses in his life, the first was when he was 27 when he was married and separated, he built a dirt house; the second time he built a green brick house with a layer of dirt on it in the 1990s, with a total of two storeys. At that time, such a green brick house was the best in the village; the third was a four-story reinforced concrete building that had just been built in recent years, and the foundation was particularly deep. He said that the earthquake of magnitude 7 or 8 could not be knocked down.

Uncle Kikyo's sons and daughters didn't take the money to build this house. This is a question in my mind. The old couple planted more than a mu of land, and the income from farming is very meagre. What is known is that the government has compensated 100000 yuan for the construction of highways in the past two years, but it is far from enough to build a four-storey building. After talking carefully with Uncle Kikyo, I learned that it took two and a half years from the start of the building to the construction of the frame, and many of the jobs that should be hired were not invited, all by Uncle Kikyo himself. He uses his spare time to lay foundations, pick bricks and carry sand. As long as he can do it, he will not hire anyone. This is a semi-contracted worker.

According to Uncle Kikyo, there is a difference of more than one hundred thousand yuan between the semi-contractor and the full-contract union to build a building. At present, many houses in rural areas are semi-contracted workers. If you ask carefully, you will know that the buildings of many families in rural areas are built by their parents with the money they have saved and semi-contracted workers in their leisure time. Some young people come back with some money when they work outside the home, while others don't.

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For ordinary families, it is almost impossible to build such a building without the help of the elderly. Many young people told me that they didn't know how to live without the support of their parents. Even if they stay in the village, it will be very difficult for them to accomplish so many things that their parents do: they have to work in the fields, take care of their children, and build houses. They prefer to go out to work.

The children of most families are left at home a few months after birth by their grandparents, and if they are brought to the city, not to mention that education, health care and other security do not cover the groups of migrant workers, even if various institutional conditions are available, to bring children to the city at least one person at home to take care of the children. If you bring your grandparents from your hometown to the city, you will not only lose a share of your hometown's income, but also increase the pension burden of young people. Working income is very limited, although it is not very good for children to stay at home, it is probably the best choice for many families under the current conditions.