In the era of collectivization, did farmers truly miss it?

1. Committed to collecting rural oral history from the second half of the 20th century

The origins of oral history research: "History without grassroots voices is incomplete"

Xu Shuming: Teacher Guo, for nearly fifteen years, you have persisted in fieldwork. Could you briefly introduce the background of your oral history research project?

Guo Yuhua: This project began in the mid-to-late 1990s. At the time, Teacher Sun Liping was at Peking University, Teacher Shen Yuan and I were at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Ying Xing was still a student, and there was also a small group of master's and doctoral students. We wanted to conduct an oral history study positioned on Chinese rural social life in the second half of the 20th century, so Teacher Sun and I led such a project. The original plan was to find six villages in different regions across the country and collect interview materials from farmers separately. For several years we kept working to implement this plan, but in reality only four villages were opened up, namely Xi Village in Hebei, Ji Village in northern Shaanxi, Liuping Village in Sichuan (now part of Chongqing), and Shiwan Village in the Northeast.

Yuan Xunhui: Why choose these villages? Was it just a simple sample?

⟧ Guo Yuhua: At the time, we hoped to select samples in different regions, including both the south and the north. Our last two villages were meant to be chosen in the south, but we lacked manpower, because choosing villages in the south - Guangdong or the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area - involved many difficulties, such as dialect issues. Moreover, many of the students involved stopped researching in this field after graduation, so there was not enough manpower, and the remaining two villages could not be opened up. In addition, although the investigations in all four villages were based on the oral history approach, their degrees of completion differed. The investigation in Ji Village was relatively comprehensive, basically covering its history in the second half of the 20th century. The investigation directions of the other villages each had different emphases; some villages did relatively comprehensive work on "land reform," while others did more on "cooperativization." The original intentions of this oral history project included two aspects:

First, China today is in the process of social transformation. If we want to pay attention to today's transformation, we first need to understand the state of Chinese society before the transformation. Many people believe that the transformation has encountered a bottleneck and can no longer proceed, and some even say that reform is dead. This makes research on the form of Chinese society before the transformation - between 1949 and reform and opening up - even more necessary, including both the basic nature of its social system and its mode of operation in reality. Therefore, when studying any phenomenon in contemporary China, the issue of transformation cannot be avoided, and analysis of the transformation process also requires a historical thread. Previously, sociology did not pay much attention to history. When we now try to make up for this deficiency and look back at past history, we find that the current history has major problems, because it only includes official history, that is, the historical narrative of mainstream ideology, which contains much concealment, distortion, and even fabrication. Therefore, we need to present history from different levels. History needs different voices; a history with only one voice is certainly problematic and must be questioned. In past history, whether official history or scholarly research, the experiences and feelings of the most ordinary villagers and village women in the historical process have been ignored. So at that time we had an aspiration: to be able to know these people's experiences and their understanding of this period of history. Whether you call it a review or a retrospective, our purpose was to collect and record such a history. After all, history without grassroots voices is incomplete and also untrue. History cannot exist only in a single way.

Second, as researchers, we needed to have a basic understanding and judgment of Chinese society and be able to discuss it theoretically or academically, so we proposed the concept of "communist civilization." To define it, we need to look at the logic by which it operates social life, and through specific historical materials and the accounts of those who lived through it, understand its mechanisms and logic. In particular, through process-oriented research, we need to present its mechanisms and structures. This is an academic and theoretical pursuit.

At the time we also knew that advancing this project would be very difficult, because collecting history itself is a thankless task. We were not especially confident about theoretical summary either. After collecting and recording, whether we could fulfill our theoretical aspirations was still unknown. We could only advance step by step from listening, recording, and presenting to research analysis.

This is the general background of our oral history research project.

From "leaders" to "relatives": establishing mutual trust with villagers

Xu Shuming: The greatest difficulty in fieldwork is how to integrate into the life situation of farmers. Did you encounter similar difficulties during your investigation? And how did you solve them?

Guo Yuhua: In this regard, we had an interdisciplinary advantage. The ethnographic method of anthropology requires researchers to integrate into local social life, so that they can view and think about problems from the perspective of local people.

Of course, it also requires considerable time investment and interaction. It is impossible to become familiar with farmers through one or two contacts and make them believe you and be willing to tell you everything.

Xu Shuming: Can you give an example?

Guo Yuhua: For example, in Ji Village, when we first went to investigate, local people still had to carry water, because their cave dwellings were all halfway up the mountain. They had to go down into the gully, fetch water from the well there, and then climb back up the mountain. At the time, our investigation team had several people, and the landlord family's water consumption suddenly increased a lot. They had to carry more water to have enough. We felt quite bad about increasing the landlord's burden, so we went to carry water ourselves. I could only carry it along the flat stretch, because if you carry it up the mountain, you cannot set it down midway. I simply could not carry it up, but we had only one young man, so I could only carry it to the foot of the mountain and he carried it up. It was indeed quite laborious.

When we went to investigate the second year, some people in their village began trying to dig wells for their own households, then bury a deep-water pump and pump water up the mountain, so that they had running water. After several people in our team discussed it, we paid the money and the landlord family provided the labor. We dug a well in the cellar below his house where potatoes were stored. At the time we even hired a feng shui master, because no one knew where water could be found, so only after the feng shui master observed the site could it be decided. We all found this especially funny, but it seemed we really hit great luck: water came out on the first try, and the water quality was quite good. Then we buried the deep-water pump and laid pipes. Afraid that the pipes would freeze and break in winter, laying the pipes was also a huge project. First we had to build a water cellar on the mountain above their cave dwelling, pump water up the mountain, then bury pipes in the mountain and send the water to the landlord's house.

In fact, interacting with farmers does not require you to deliberately do anything. It is more about everyone interacting in a friendly, sincere, mutually trusting, and reciprocal way. Later, as we became more and more familiar with people in the village, if some young people in the village wanted to find work in Beijing, we would also help. Our relationship with them became like that of relatives. When we first went, they also saw us as outsiders, and moreover as people from Beijing, so they thought we were sent from above. No matter how much we explained that we were just teachers and students, not leaders, it was useless.

In the process of slowly building trust, they also asked us for help with some of their folk belief activities, such as worshiping the Dragon King and Guanyin. At first, they also had some concerns, feeling that people from outside would certainly not support these "superstitious and backward" things. Once, when the village was repairing a temple and remaking the spirit tablets, someone was needed to write characters on the tablets, and they could not find a suitable person in the village. At the time, Teacher Luo Hongguang from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and I were in the village. The former Party branch secretary - after he stepped down, he became the person in charge of the temple fair and was responsible for the village's "community affairs" - came running to us and asked very timidly: "You are both doctoral graduates, could you help us write the characters?" The two of us said in unison: "Yes." Only after agreeing did we realize there was a problem: neither of us knew calligraphy! I said: "Then let's practice quickly." So we went to the landlord's fourth-grade daughter and borrowed a brush and ink, and practiced writing on newspapers. After practicing, we found it still would not work. How could we learn it in such a short time? Later we thought for a long time about what to do, and finally brought up the Hanting Lishu font from a laptop. It was especially beautiful and most suitable for writing tablets. We thought of many ways and traced it onto wooden boards. We stayed up all night and traced all the characters on the five tablets, and did not dare let anyone see us. We could only do it secretly in the room. After dawn, we put the tablets with traced characters on the windowsill. Just as the sun was rising, the old branch secretary came. He was very happy when he saw them and said: "Beautifully written! Truly worthy of doctoral graduates." We did not dare say they were traced.

Over time, they also knew that we were very sincere and willing to interact with them reciprocally and make friends, so gradually there were no more obstacles in communication, and interviews turned into casual chats.

2. Can communism be called a form of civilization?

Understanding "civilization" from the perspective of daily life

Xu Shuming: You just mentioned the origins of oral history research. It hopes to propose a new interpretation of contemporary Chinese history. Then, compared with the currently more popular research on the history of the founding of the People's Republic, where is the innovation of the analytical concept of "communist civilization"?

Guo Yuhua: This concept was not proposed only today. When we first began doing oral history, we discussed this concept many times. At the time, both Teacher Sun and I wrote related articles, believing that there must be a concept capable of covering this period of history we want to study today. Some people define it as "Communist culture" or "Party culture." But I think that is not enough, and the scope is too narrow. Of course, there will be much debate about the concept of "communist civilization." Some say that it is not civilization but barbarism. In this regard, it can be clarified from two aspects:

First, it involves the concept of "civilization." In the past, understandings of "civilization" were all positive, emphasizing civilization as opposed to barbarism and believing that civilization carried meanings of enlightenment and awakening. But today we can understand it as a neutral concept: it is simply a form of expression of culture developing to a certain degree. This is not a definition we invented ourselves. Elias's The Civilizing Process actually already used the concept of "civilization" in this way. He mentioned that, for example, the British and French looked down on each other and said the other's way of behaving was uncivilized. In Civilization, Civil has the meaning of "politeness" and carries a sense of affirmation and pride in one's own culture. We may as well not take the positive understanding first.

Second, it involves the specific content of civilization. In the past, when the word civilization was mentioned, we often associated it with grand material civilizational achievements (such as the Great Wall and the pyramids) or spiritual civilizational achievements (thought, theory, monumental works, and so on). In addition, there is another very important level, namely institutional civilization. It means the framework of organizations and institutions on which society depends, as well as its specific mode of operation under this structure. This is of course also part of the content of civilization. Usually people easily overlook ordinary people under the framework of civilization, their ways of life, behavioral patterns, thinking, speaking, and expression. In fact, these are all related to civilization.

Therefore, our understanding of communist civilization is based on examining the daily lives of ordinary people and understanding civilization from a grassroots perspective. If we only make positive and grand interpretations, we will ignore the living conditions of the greatest majority of people in society. Compared with Western capitalist civilization, communist civilization is very different, because its cultural foundation, institutional arrangements, and even national character are all different. Therefore, using the concept of "communist civilization" to refer to the period of history we want to analyze is valid and also operationally researchable. Since we can construct history from the daily lives of ordinary people, we should also be able to understand the logic of civilization from ordinary people's actions and speech.