Building a New Rural Civilization: The First Chapter of a 21st-Century "Epigraph for a Humble Room"
Lead image courtesy of Chen Wei-bin
A mountain need not be high; it is famous so long as there is an immortal on it. A lake need not be deep; it has power to work wonders so long as there is a dragon in it. This is a humble room, but my virtue gives it fragrance. Moss marks creep up the steps, all green; the color of grass enters the blinds, all blue. Here we laugh and talk with great scholars; among us there are no unlettered men. Here one may play the plain zither and read the golden classics. No din of strings and pipes clogs the ear; no paperwork wears down the body. It is like Zhuge Liang's cottage in Nanyang, or Yang Xiong's pavilion in the Western Shu. As Confucius said: "How can it be humble?" ~ Liu Yuxi
Preface: Sustainable Rural Community
Rural areas and villages are, generally speaking, almost synonymous, and only recently has the term "rural community" come into more common use. Although no one has given it a clear definition, I rather like the term, because it can also mean "hometown."
Why must the rural community be sustainable? First, it is an important living model of human civilization, a treasure of humanity; second, quite apart from how hard humans may try to build artificial environments to produce food, it remains an indispensable mechanism for producing the food humanity needs.
The rural (community) village is a social, cultural and living spatial system produced in the course of human development. For a system to persist and not be eliminated by time, it needs to achieve sustainable development in economic, ecological and cultural terms. Economic sustainability means that within a certain scope (a country, a region), all activities of production, distribution, circulation and consumption can operate endlessly; ecological sustainability means hoping to regulate human development so that it draws from the environment only what this generation needs for its development, without harming the environmental resources needed by the next generation; cultural sustainability means hoping that the implements, institutions and ideas used in the life of this region, including language, writing, customs and thought, and so on, can be passed down far into the future, enabling communication and understanding between generations.
The term "sustainability" is translated from the English word sustainability, and a more appropriate translation would be "sustainable character." For organisms with finite lives, sustainability involves having the possibility of transmission; for the sustainability of a rural community, it requires people of all age groups to exist at the same time in order to achieve transmission, and at the same time it requires diverse composition to present a complete web of cause and effect, making the whole system more stable. Today's rural villages have the elderly and children, but are missing the young people in between; such a gap seriously threatens the completeness and sustainability of the rural community.
Can the countryside have a sky for young people?
More than forty years of industrialization in Taiwan, China has drained the countryside of its manpower, continuously plundered its important resources, and, compounded by biased industrial policy, turned our countryside into a place that cannot sustain a household, letting irrigation ditches dry up, fields go to waste and old farmers wither away. But is the rural community really a place without a future?
Imagine a scenario: 5 young recent graduate students rent a three-sided courtyard house and 5 hectares of farmland at the junction of town and country, providing food for 100 nearby families. Each of them, while writing articles that pay attention to rural community society and thinking about how to build an ecological village, arranges four hours of farm work every day, friendly maintaining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm that brings in 1.5 million in income each year.
Their research life accompanies spring plowing, summer weeding, autumn harvest and winter storage. In the busy farming season, they call friends and find classmates or member families to help. In summer, classmates gather in the open courtyard to drink and make merry; in winter, there is an inexhaustible supply of fresh vegetables for hot pot to warm the stomach; in spring there are unplugged concerts; in autumn there are authentic local festivals. In the fields, young and fit figures reappear, farmers and village girls of dazzling charm; this natural, at-ease manner of speaking is nothing less than a heaven-sent beauty of form, and from body to soul, this village is full of allure and spirituality.
The three-sided courtyard house looks old on the outside, but its network and communications equipment is complete. Their information has no borders, and they can meet face to face with research-room companions at any time. This is also an important conference center; although it is not in a capital region, important speeches and declarations held here can be broadcast in real time to every corner of the world.
Many farmer brothers in the village serve as their ready helpers, teaching them to plant and harvest. At specific festivals they hold simple markets for the village, letting the lively grandpas and grandmas reminisce about old times, and introducing this village to their own friends, classmates, community and family.
I think that as long as more imagination and information are given, this story can still develop in many possible directions. Is it really true that young people's learning, young people's vitality and boldness cannot create a new atmosphere in the countryside?
Knowledge, Creativity and Wisdom: Building a New Rural Community Civilization
Building a sustainable rural community is labor-intensive work, and even more knowledge-intensive work.
It is labor-intensive because many things that can be done easily with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides and mechanical power (using fossil fuels) must now be replaced by animal power (including human power). And where does the knowledge intensity come from? Counting upward from beneath the soil, let us look at the relevant knowledge that may be needed to run a sustainable rural community: microorganisms, soil, water quality, plants, pathogens (disease), insect pests (insects), microclimate, meteorology, machinery (such as: tillers), power (such as: waterwheels), construction (such as: protected agriculture), materials (such as: organic inputs), aesthetics, community building, production and marketing, policy (such as: land regulations) ... If basic sciences are all calculated in, then what a sustainable rural community needs is the knowledge of an entire university.
In the new rural community, besides contributing the knowledge they themselves have learned, the most important thing for young people is to play the role of linking knowledge. Young people of this era have mostly received a good higher education and have enough cultivation to absorb, discern and apply the knowledge they need. They also have enough ability to conduct field surveys and research, and can directly converse with experts in various fields and ask them questions. In addition, the old wisdom of each locality needs young people's creativity and vitality to participate in reviving it.
Taiwan, China's rural communities are in fact influenced by Tangshan, and the smallholder economy and Confucian culture have softened the character of rural community groups in both existence and consciousness, but the agrarian civilization of a new Taiwan, China needs a character that is both gentle and outward-reaching. Taiwan, China's new agrarian civilization should be built on people and land, on animals, on existing technology and on human knowledge, pursuing not only inner calm but also a wildness that belongs to nature; this wild temperament lies in this generation of young people who possess a worldview, are skilled at using communication technology and think in leaps.
Alexander dominated Europe, Asia and Africa at 33, and the Hegemon-King of Chu led 8000 Jiangdong disciples to contend for the Central Plains at 27; can this bold spirit that belongs to young people also be used to build a 21st-century new rural community civilization? (To be continued)