What is the empirical standpoint of the Huazhong rural school?
The research of the Huazhong rural school originates from rural experience and is rooted in rural experience. They adhere to a basic empirical standpoint, use team cooperation as a vehicle, and constantly struggle through experience, coming from experience and going into experience, basing themselves on experience while also transcending it. Through summary and elevation, they have gradually explored a viable path for the localization of Chinese social science.
I
At the beginning of this century, Huazhong village governance research turned toward the study of the nature of rural society during the period of transformation, that is, research on the social foundation of rural governance. This research attempts, through in-depth investigation of rural areas in different regions across the country, to understand the current situation of Chinese rural society and its regional differences, thereby understanding the processes, mechanisms and consequences of law, policy and institutions entering different rural societies, and seeks to understand rural society itself through the differences in how top-down and outside-in policies, laws and institutions enter rural society, and further to explore the problems of law, policy and institutional formulation. In this way, its research entered the operational stage of thematic research and regional comparison. After 2005, Huazhong village governance research devoted more academic energy to dynamic overall social change. In this way, classic propositions of traditional sociology, such as intergenerational relations, marriage and family, kinship systems, private life, husband-wife relations, emotions, disputes, renqing, public space, and suicide, also entered the research horizon, while new topics such as petitions, land institutions, township operations, class differentiation, land expropriation and demolition, agricultural economy, and the mass line continued to emerge.
⟦NL> In the more than 20 years of development of Huazhong village governance research, each stage has produced a certain amount of research results and theoretical viewpoints; each research transformation, on the basis of inheriting some basic ideas, has had to break through the original vision and research fields, thereby pushing the research to a new level. In the process of inheritance and development, Huazhong village governance research has gradually formed some of its own characteristics, accumulated some of its own experience, and created some of its own research paradigms, and is called the “Huazhong rural school”.
The Huazhong rural school has its own basic standpoint, viewpoints and methods regarding Chinese social science research. The main purpose of this article is to make a preliminary summary of the basic empirical standpoint of the Huazhong rural school.
II
“Naive empiricism” is a basic impression outsiders have of Huazhong village governance research and its school. They believe that such a group of people go deep into rural areas to investigate, endure hardship and work hard, brave hardships, and have grasped first-hand rural materials. Their courage and academic drive are worthy of encouragement and advocacy, and the collection of materials is also necessary. This is the first step toward true scholarship. But they also believe that this group of people go to the countryside with empty heads, enter villages without presuppositions, and even despise theory from the bone and hate frameworks, and bring back nothing but a pile of dead materials. Therefore, this group's experience is naive, is empiricist, or even anti-intellectual. This is the greatest criticism outsiders make of the Huazhong rural school, and also the greatest misreading. The fundamental reason for this situation is that the school is still in its initial stage, and its main task is mainly to train talent, so the academic results shown to the outside world are not yet very many, nor systematic enough, let alone a self-conscious presentation of the basic standpoint, viewpoints and methods of research.
“Empirical research” is the basic standpoint of the Huazhong rural school, namely that Huazhong village governance research is experience-centered, rather than centered on any other subject or any object. The emphasis on “experience” is indeed a consistent proposition of Huazhong village governance research and its school, and is also the foundation of its establishment, the basis of its strengthening, and the soul of its transmission. “Experience” has been elevated to a supreme position in its research. But the “experience” and “empirical research” understood by the Huazhong rural school are not the same thing as the “experience” and “empirical research” of this school interpreted by outsiders. Outsiders believe that the school's “experience” is phenomena, materials, and policy, and that the school's research is phenomenon description, material arrangement, and countermeasure analysis, but not theoretical research. In the final analysis, the “empirical research” done by this school is not academic research. Therefore, in the face of these misreadings and misjudgments, it is necessary to straighten things out and clarify them. Straightening out and clarifying must have the negative side of “breaking”, namely breaking misreadings and misjudgments, and more importantly must have the affirmative side of “establishing”, namely laying out the basic standpoint fully and openly.
III
First, on the side of “breaking”, only by clarifying “what experience is not” can one know “what empirical research is not”, and then can one positively answer “what experience is” and “what empirical research is”.
1. Experience is not phenomenon, and empirical research is not phenomenon description. Phenomenon refers to the external form manifested by a person or thing in the process of development and change. Phenomena in rural areas are the social forms displayed by rural social personnel in the process of interaction in production, life and social interaction, as well as the processes of occurrence, development and change formed by rural things under the action of people. Rural phenomena in social science research mainly refer to rural political and social phenomena, including both phenomena formed by the interaction among rural social members and phenomena produced by the interaction between social members and other rural things. Rural social phenomena can be static or dynamic, and can even be the process itself. Rural social phenomena are not isolated; they are the result of interaction between people or between people and things, and therefore they also display a certain connectedness.
Rural social phenomena are the main component of experience, but experience is not only phenomena. First, phenomenon is an objective form, and philosophically speaking, it is the normal manifestation under certain conditions of the principal aspect of the principal contradiction of a thing or relationship. The manifestation itself can be either a distortion of fact or a true embodiment of fact, and therefore there is a distinction between false appearance and true appearance. But social experience is the research subject's grasp of the principal aspect of the principal contradiction itself, and is a product of the blending of subject and object. That is to say, “seeing the essence through phenomena”, experience is the essence of a thing or relationship. It is not an objective existing thing like phenomenon; it requires the subject, through subjective effort, based on phenomena yet penetrating surface phenomena, to grasp the principal contradiction of a thing or relationship and its principal aspect. Without the blending of subjective and objective, experience will not naturally appear. In one sentence, experience requires researchers to feel and comprehend it.
Experience is also not the surface connection or surface correlation between phenomena. At the philosophical level, things or phenomena never exist in isolation, but exist in mutual connection and mutual contrast. But this mode of existence between phenomena does not necessarily constitute experience. Connections between phenomena are universal, and therefore also chaotic. Almost all phenomena can be linked in some way; for example, A, B and C are each linked to one another, in an interlocking kind of connection, but this does not naturally constitute a regular chain-like connection among A-B-C. Experience is a chain-like connection, the chain-like connection between the principal contradiction behind phenomena and its principal aspect. That is, the principal aspect of the principal contradiction behind one phenomenon can lead to the principal aspect of the principal contradiction behind another phenomenon, and can continue to lead further. Experience is the summary and presentation of this process of derivation.
To sum up, phenomenon is the objective form between things or relationships and their chaotic connections, while experience is the subject's perception of the chain-like connections between the principal aspects of the principal contradictions behind phenomena. Therefore, empirical research is not an objective description of phenomena, but an induction, refinement and summary of the chain-like connections behind phenomena.
2. Experience is not material, and empirical research is not material arrangement. Phenomenon, as an objective form and its connections, is a frame that needs material to fill and portray it, and material is its most basic substance. Without filling phenomena with material, phenomena will not become full and three-dimensional, and cannot be expressed. In the field of social science, there are two kinds of material: one is quantitative material, and the other is qualitative material. The former mainly expresses and explains objective phenomena and their connections through data, tables, models, etc., and pursues an objective, static effect that removes subjective factors as much as possible. The latter mainly describes and portrays phenomena and their connections through story performance, event processes, feature sketches, etc., in order to display their full picture and the dynamic process of interaction.
Material is more colorful and chaotic than phenomenon. As research material, it requires researchers, according to the needs of the research, after collecting materials, to select, arrange and process them. Therefore, not all materials can be collected, and not all collected materials will be used in research. In this sense, material is objective, but the use of material is not objective; the use of material is subordinate to research. This necessarily gives rise to research that first has a theoretical framework, then goes to phenomena to collect materials, and through trimming materials confirms or falsifies the existing theoretical framework. In such research, material may be a maidservant, dressed up and tossed about at the researcher's need, and thus research may become disconnected from facts, and theory disconnected from experience. In such research, material is dead, without its own life, because material is not part of constituting real phenomena, especially real experience. Material has vitality only within experience.
Material is not experience, and experience is not material. Material composes phenomena, and experience is the chain-like connection behind phenomena. Then the connection between experience and material is also the connection between skeleton and flesh. Chain-like connection is pure reasoning, dry and skinny, and only with flesh added can it display its vigorous vitality. That is to say, only when experience is explained, described and demonstrated through material and phenomena will it be more sufficient, more persuasive, and more as it truly is. Without the proof of material and phenomena, the presentation of experience will not be so strong and powerful, so natural, and is more likely to be specious. And when material lacks the experience to which it attaches and adheres, it will be manipulated and trimmed at will, as in the aforementioned research. Therefore, true research should collect materials on the basis of mastering experience; only then is experience real and material reliable. Likewise, empirical research is not merely material arrangement; material arrangement is one step in demonstrating experience. Research that is only material arrangement is not empirical research.
3. Experience is not policy, and empirical research is not countermeasure analysis. Policy refers to a series of governance measures issued by the Party and the government, and the political and social consequences they produce. Countermeasure analysis is the analysis of some problems arising in the formulation and implementation of policy, and the proposal of improved countermeasures. General writing consists of several parts: manifestation, problems, consequences and countermeasures. Another situation in countermeasure analysis is the research model of “I annotate the Six Classics” that exists within the discipline of “scientific socialism”, namely rationality demonstration of the major policies and policy measures issued by the Party and the state. Countermeasure-analytic research is generally considered not strongly academic, lacking intellectual challenge, lacking profundity, and making no contribution to theory. This kind of research is what policy research departments of the Party and government do. If scholars also devote themselves to it, they will be despised. Some people think that the Huazhong rural school pays too much attention to rural policy, and so contemptuously dismiss it as policy research.