An Analysis of the Utilitarian Mentality of Contemporary Chinese Peasants

The modernization process of contemporary China has broken through the isolation of rural society, creating the precondition for the emergence of various new concepts and new trends of thought. Recently, some research articles have pointed out that among the diverse trends of thought arising against the backdrop of social change, utilitarianism was the most widespread for a time. It constitutes a striking feature of contemporary Chinese rural social psychology, and the various aspirations, predilections, creeds, intentions, and ideals flowing through peasants' minds all clearly reflect this.

In the article "The Historical Fate of Utilitarianism in China," written in 1987, the author already attempted to demonstrate that for over two thousand years, utilitarian thought was no more disdained than "ethical principles"; through the channels of people's daily social activities and social psychology, it persistently displayed strong vitality and became one of the cultural legacies of a long history. This article, in a sense a continuation, mainly seeks to discuss three questions: (1) the socially significant characteristics that the utilitarian mentality has brought to the contemporary peasant group, (2) the harmful effects that cannot be ignored, which the prevalence of the utilitarian mentality has caused to rural economic development and the building of spiritual civilization, and (3) the common origin but divergent development of Chinese and Western utilitarian doctrines, as well as the developmental orientation of the utilitarian mentality of contemporary Chinese peasants.

(1)

If it may be said that China's peasant group long endured the external pressure and bondage of traditional ideologies such as valuing righteousness and belittling profit, and of clearing the mind and curbing desires, then the pursuit of wealth and material interests was always their inner impulse. As changes in socioeconomic life and social conditions reached a certain degree, this inner impulse would become very evident and openly challenge the traditional preaching disseminated by virtue of administrative power. Since the 1980s, the tide of commodity economy brought by the reform and opening-up policy came surging forward. In rural areas, the trend toward commercialization, starting from the adjustment of rural relations of production, rapidly extended into all other domains. This fundamental change shook the cornerstone of the values and behavioral norms established during the forty years since the founding of the People's Republic, prompting people to form new views on the realities of society and on individual meaning, to seek anew an objective standard for weighing and shaping the measure of things, and to seek anew adaptation to the new environment. Those most keenly responsive to this were the peasants' mentalities. Based on their personal experience of participating in commodity production and the commodity market, they felt that pursuing personal interests did not conflict with the public interest of society, because the basis for evaluating behavior lies not in what its motives are but in the effects it produces; that in social interaction, acting according to one's own interests in order to satisfy one's needs and attain happiness is precisely the basic pillar sustaining survival and development; and that under the conditions of a commodity economy, the basic means and effective path to realizing personal happiness and interests is to obtain sufficient money and wealth, while the amount of money one possesses also sustains one's social status and social role. These understandings constitute the main features of the utilitarian mentality of contemporary Chinese peasants.

Under the sway of this utilitarian mentality, the moral principles centered on asceticism and egalitarianism that flourished during the "Cultural Revolution" lost their authority and were unhesitatingly cast aside. Peasants were elated by propaganda through the media encouraging them to strive to get rich. Taking the pursuit of money, wealth, and enjoyment as their personal pursuit and life goal, they radiated tremendous labor enthusiasm. This utilitarian mentality not only successfully aroused the drive of contemporary peasants and objectively served as a basic driving force for breaking the characteristics of a natural economy such as the self-sufficiency of material production, the egalitarianism of consumer goods distribution, the closed nature of product circulation, and the suppression of consumption, but also endowed the contemporary Chinese peasant group with certain socially significant characteristics.

First, the utilitarian mentality led peasants to tend to emphasize time efficiency.

Since the advent of modern contact between China and the West, people had begun to develop some awareness of the urgency of the pace of time, but this was mainly confined to some coastal cities and was mostly tied to political and military situations. As for the pace of agricultural production and social activities in the interior, these still proceeded slowly according to traditional seasonal records such as the "Monthly Ordinances" chapter of the Book of Rites. Since the 1980s, the emphasis on and pursuit of the pace and efficiency of time, as a derivative of the utilitarian mentality, developed rapidly across the vast countryside. The broad masses of peasants caught in the tide of the commodity economy personally realized that the faster and shorter the repetition time of identical economic acts and processes, and the alternation time of different economic acts and processes, the more advantageous it was: within the same cycle, relying on diligent labor and effective management, one could complete production and circulation beyond the usual frequency, thereby obtaining benefits beyond the usual frequency. The tighter the rhythm of production and circulation, the stronger the awareness of time efficiency. "Time is money" is a vivid summation of this mentality. Peasants of the 1980s already sought to abandon the small-peasant social mechanism accustomed to a slow rhythm and to using solar terms to regulate economic production and social activities, and to stride toward the fast rhythm of industrialization. Even in remote mountain villages, we can see this trend. Someone once made a concrete analysis of the time-utilization structure over a year of peasants in a certain production team in Zunyi, Guizhou,[1] from which it can be found that, apart from devoting as much time as possible to agricultural labor, peasants also paid attention to finding ways to spend less agricultural labor time in exchange for more labor output, while the time wasted each year on meaningless social formalities was also reduced to a minimum.

Second, the utilitarian mentality prompted peasants to break through their narrow scope of life and broaden the space of interpersonal interaction.

One of the characteristics of the self-sufficient small-peasant economy was that the comprehensive household, composed of scattered and isolated household handicraft industry and small-scale agriculture, formed the core of rural society. As the saying goes, "Every family guards its village trade, and none goes out the door till white hair." (a poem by Bai Juyi) The scope of people's activities rarely exceeded the natural village, and exchange and mutual aid were also centered on small regional market towns. With the rise and development of the contemporary rural commodity economy, peasants have become increasingly dissatisfied with the complete yet backward level of self-sufficiency. They measure the degree of satisfaction of the utilitarian mentality by the amount of wealth and income, and hope to obtain more money by increasing opportunities for commodity exchange. Thus, the pursuit of money and wealth transformed into concern for external exchange markets, prompting them to consciously break through the narrow, limited village scope and the closed state of being confined to one place year-round, and to extend toward towns and cities. In this way, as the scope of activity and interaction continuously broadened, peasants' horizons increasingly widened, and the breadth and density of interaction with the outside world also increased day by day, thereby directly giving rise to the emergence of urban-rural economic networks.