Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain always brings to mind Fei Xiaotong’s From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society; both books are classic works in their respective fields. White Deer Plain is a long novel on the rural Guanzhong region, completed by the Shaanxi writer Chen Zhongshi in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly 500,000 words in length, expressing “the understanding and experience of a writer who is one of the people born and raised here”; From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society is a theoretical treatise on rural society completed by the sociologist Fei Xiaotong in the late 1940s, only a little over 50,000 words, carrying a theorist’s reflection and summary at the level of shared characteristics of China’s grassroots traditional society. The story of White Deer Plain takes place over half a century from the late Qing and early Republic to the eve of the founding of the PRC, presenting the entire process by which a feudal patriarchal clan society bound by blood ties gradually disintegrates; the author’s purpose is: “to use my pen to draw the soul of this nation.” From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society is the author’s second-phase “analysis of social structure” after doing a great deal of “field community research,” a generalization distilled from concrete phenomena about the universal nature of China’s traditional grassroots society.
Therefore, we believe that what is implicit in White Deer Plain is not merely the history of social transformation in a particular rural area over nearly half a century, but also “a secret history of a nation,” a vivid, concrete and minute tableau of “From the Soil.” And given that From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society was written in 1947, which happens to be close to the ending time of the story in White Deer Plain, a comparative reading of the two books will appear both interesting and enlightening. This article will offer a modest contribution by conducting the first comparative study of the two texts. However, due to limitations of time and ability, when faced with the massive White Deer Plain and the highly abstract From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, what this article can presently do is experimental in nature. That is to say, for the time being this article intends only to compare the two texts from a static rather than dynamic perspective, and from a partial rather than comprehensive angle. Therefore, this article also, for the time being, does not draw conclusions.
1. A consanguineous society under the patrilineal principle
1.1 From the standpoint of definition, a rural society refers to a stable social form that makes a living by agriculture, is closed, and lacks mobility. Such a social form needs to be connected by blood relations—that is, it maintains the society’s own structural stability through reproduction. The result of stability is: this society is often composed of several surnames that are close in blood or share the same origin, passed down generation after generation, slowly evolving, forming what we now call patriarchal clans. The Bai and Lu lineages in White Deer Village are precisely such a patriarchal clan, marked by a jointly worshipped ancestral hall, represented by the two households of Bai Jiaxuan and Lu Zilin. In other words, White Deer Village is a consanguineous society with the Bai and Lu surnames as its main body; moreover, historically, the Bai and Lu lineages were also “of the same root and the same stock.” Chapter Five of the novel says that White Deer Village was originally not called White Deer Village, but Hou Family Village or Hu Family Village; it was later that a very thoughtful clan head decided to change the village name and decided to change surnames at the same time. The result of the decision was: “all those on the vine of the clan head’s eldest branch were collectively given the Bai surname; all the descendants of the second branch were collectively given the Lu surname; the Bai and Lu lineages jointly worshipped in one ancestral hall,” but according to the system of eldest-son inheritance, the clan head was to be provided by the Bai line. This rule continued through Bai Bingde, Bai Jiaxuan, and Bai Xiaowen in the novel.
1.2 Patriarchal clans are products of a patrilineal society, led by men; thus所谓 the so-called blood relationship is based on the father–son relationship. Women have a low status here, generally without identity, without even names. For example, Bai Jiaxuan’s mother, Bai Zhao-shi; Lu Zilin’s mother, Lu He-shi; and Heiwa’s mother, Lu Hui-shi, all have only a surname and no given name, and the combination of surnames follows the principle of following the husband and following the father, representing that women’s personal dependence on men is both lifelong (following the father) and family-centered (following the husband). The family-centered principle in women’s names embodies the general cultural concept of a patriarchal society. “The great virtue of Heaven and Earth is called giving birth.” In a rural society that does not seek change (detailed below), the primary purpose of the union of men and women is not to satisfy inherent human desire, but to submit to the fundamental need to maintain the existence of the clan (the family is the basic unit of the clan); unions to satisfy desire would only cause unstable change and therefore must be prohibited. From this meaning, the home becomes “a continuing enterprise community,” and reproductive function is one of its enterprises. At the beginning of White Deer Plain, with a magical realist touch, the narrative describes the Bai Jiaxuan family’s enormous efforts and willingness to exhaust their fortune in seven marriages, truly presenting the indispensable importance of the enterprise of reproduction for a family—especially given Bai Jiaxuan’s future status as clan head, this significance transcends a particular family and belongs to the whole clan.
1.3 Fei Xiaotong believes that in rural society, the family can actually be regarded as a small clan; the difference between the two concepts is not structural, but quantitative—in number and size. First, both family and clan are constructed according to the principle of unilineal kinship (the patrilineal principle), with the same-sex principle as primary and the opposite-sex principle as supplementary. Rural society taking the clan as the basic community is merely a renewed emphasis on the primacy of the same-sex principle. Second, the Chinese concept of jia (home/family) is elastic in scope: it can refer to a husband and wife, it can include brothers and paternal uncles, and it can also be several generations under one roof. Therefore, since the clan structurally includes the family, the smallest clan can also equal a family. Conversely, using the term “extended family” does not reveal the structural consistency between family and clan in rural society, and thus is not used. This insightful understanding of Fei Xiaotong is based on his observation of the differential mode of association in China’s rural society. The differential mode of association means that in a rural society bound by blood ties, each person’s network of social relations extends outward from the self by analogical extension; each person’s network of social relations is thus particular, embodying an egoistic value concept. Traditional so-called ethical relations, such as ruler–subject, father–son, husband–wife, elder–younger, noble–base, close–distant, above–below, etc., can be regarded as the basic framework of this social-relations network, but specifics vary according to an individual’s value choices. Yet at the macro level, this social-relations network is proportional to the magnitude of central power. As far as influence reaches, the Chinese thus feel particularly deeply about the fickleness of human relationships. This flexible, elastic network of social relations is the root cause, and it is also the reason why there is elasticity in the boundary between group and self in Chinese families and clans.
However, the concept of the small clan is not well embodied in White Deer Plain, for two reasons: first, although both the Bai and Lu households are at least three generations under one roof, this three-generations-under-one-roof is a trunk family in the lineal sense and cannot make one feel deeply that its difference from the conjugal family (nuclear family) is structural rather than quantitative; second, although the Bai and Lu households, as historically “of the same root and the same stock,” must cooperate fully on matters such as repairing the ancestral hall, building the school, and other major events that happened later—otherwise they could not be accomplished—such cooperation is, rather than long-term clan-based, more temporary and affair-based, or perhaps both. By the time blood relations have flowed to their generation, they are already quite sparse; by the children’s generation, they are even unrelated (Bai Ling and Zhaohai’s romantic relationship is “accidental”). To say they are one family, I’m afraid they themselves would not agree. The reason the two households can be linked together is of course partly due to the patriarchal clan system, but more importantly, the two households’ substantial family assets and far-reaching influence, through the rural society’s network of social relations, have drawn them together—this is the result of the differential mode of association. As the two major centers of power in White Deer Village and White Deer Town, from Bai Jiaxuan’s land swap at the outset, and later the land dispute over a widow, the open struggle under the appearance of harmony between the two households had already been revealed; by the end, Bai Xiaowen’s rise to power, Lu Zilin’s madness unto death, and Bai Jiaxuan’s conscience-stricken repentance are even more the final result of the contradiction between the two households under changing times. Therefore, the union of the two households can represent the patriarchal clan of the whole White Deer Village, but to say it is a small clan in the sense of an extension of the family is not without friction. This is not to deny the appropriateness of the term small clan; rather, it is to say that the above difficulties may also be precisely the hidden dangers that the differential mode of association plants within patriarchal clans that are in the midst of changing times.
1.4 In rural society, the self-sufficiency of the small-peasant economy, the closure and lack of mobility of rural society, and the patriarchal family’s high emphasis on blood relations can, over time, easily cultivate locally a social psychology or cultural atmosphere of “those not of our kind must have different hearts,” and thus it is not easy for people of different surnames to take root here. In other words, a rural society bound by blood relations is exclusive. Exclusivity is mainly directed at males of different surnames, not females, because under the domination of the patrilineal principle, women of different surnames can easily be accepted locally through marriage, whereas males of different surnames cannot. Fei Xiaotong says, “In many villages, people who already have several generations of history are still called new guests or guest-side,” showing how difficult it is. Then how can a male of a different surname integrate into the village and become a person of the village? Fei Xiaotong’s answer is: “First is to take root in the soil: have land in the village. Second is to enter the local kinship circle through marriage.” But neither is easy, because land is protected by the clan and will not be easily transferred to outsiders, and before owning local land, wanting to enter the local blood network through marriage, or through a form of “uxorilocal marriage,” is even more out of the question. But in the author’s view, with enough luck, character, reputation, and effort, it is not impossible for an outsider to integrate into a different place. Mr. Leng is an “outsider at the foot of the southern plain mountains” on White Deer Plain; he “originally gained a foothold in White Deer Town,” yet locally he not only has extremely high prestige, he is also an important force helping to mediate the contradiction between the Bai and Lu households; his two daughters later each became a daughter-in-law of the two households. Mr. Leng’s deep roots on White Deer Plain are due to: as early as when his father, old Mr. Leng, came to White Deer Town to open a Chinese medicine shop and practice medicine, he received strong support from the clan head at that time—namely Bai Jiaxuan’s grandfather; the Leng father and son had superb medical skills and lofty medical ethics, were not calculative about fame and profit, did not show joy or anger on their faces, had a solid mass base, and had good relations with both the Bai and Lu households; Mr. Leng made his living by practicing medicine, and had no conflict of interests with the locals’ rice bowl—land. In short, in rural society, outsiders are generally rootless, and taking root is by no means easy. However, rural society under the differential mode of association likewise provides a certain possibility for outsiders to be accepted.
2 A spatiotemporal pattern lacking change
2.1 Those of the same surname live together in villages, confined to a corner, excluding those of different surnames; generation after generation rely on the land for a living, working at sunrise and resting at sunset; fathers inherit ancestral trades, sons inherit fathers’ trades, continuing the lineage and carrying on the ancestors, endlessly. Such a spatiotemporal pattern lacking change makes history—which records evolution and change—not very necessary in rural society. Not to mention history: even writing may become superfluous. Because in patterned, experience-based group life, simple everyday oral language is sufficient to handle all matters with room to spare, and thus writing loses the basis for its emergence. Fei Xiaotong put it well: “In rural society one is not afraid of forgetting, and forgets comfortably”; “each generation’s life is like screening a film,” “living repetitively within the same fixed life pattern”; “history is also superfluous; what there is are only ‘legends’.” This is precisely the situation of White Deer Plain before the upheavals of the times. Chapter Five of the novel says:
The ancestral hall was as old as the village’s history, yet not a single bamboo book or scrap of paper had been preserved. It was unclear from which year human traces began here, and impossible to say who the first tenant ancestor was who came to this slope of the plain to dig the first cave dwelling or put up the first thatched hut. Disasters that occurred repeatedly—no fewer than a hundred times—had destroyed this village completely; later people may have been surviving remnants of the original who regrouped and continued to multiply. Disasters destroyed the village, destroyed history, and destroyed memory; only absurd and fantastic tales endured.
This is the case for the village history as a whole; it is also the case for an individual’s clan history. For example, after Bai Jiaxuan and Lu Zilin finished their first land swap, Lu Zilin asked his father Lu Taiheng when the boundary stone of the Bai family land had been planted; Lu Taiheng replied without thinking: “I asked your grandfather; your grandfather couldn’t say either.” Behind these ancestral holdings that had not changed for several generations is a microcosm of several generations’ step-by-step way of life.
The fixedness of space and the repetition of events do not make people’s sense of time disappear; rather, it becomes confused and the sources and streams become unclear. For people of the present, what time has deposited is a cyclic history, a patterned tradition, experience-based ancient teachings, and mystified legends—and all of these inspire awe; the lives led by timid people are mostly ones of sticking to the old rules, meeting all changes with the unchanging. During a plague triggered by Tian Xiao’e’s death, Bai Jiaxuan recalled an incantation passed down since antiquity: “The population of White Deer Village never dares to exceed one thousand.” In fact, starting from Malthus’s classic population theory, this is nothing but a dynamic equilibrium determined by the inherent contradiction between an exponentially growing population and limited means of subsistence on the premise that existing conditions remain unchanged; thus the population always stays below a certain level. From this it can be seen that without external forces strongly changing the long-standing static situation that is difficult to alter in rural society, the people inside are not only always disinclined to change, but also good at repetition. And the reason the story in White Deer Plain can become a novel is precisely because the times have changed drastically, and rural society is gradually receding……
2.2 If the argument in the previous section views the spatiotemporal pattern of rural society’s lack of change from a diachronic perspective, then this section will argue it from a synchronic level.
From a synchronic level, rural society is a familiar society without strangers. Every person, every feature of the landscape, every custom—almost without exception—is something seen with one’s own eyes and felt with one’s own body from childhood to adulthood; and how others see oneself is likewise the same. This sense of familiarity brought by the limitations of the spatiotemporal pattern makes people immersed in it from birth to death, unable to stop; amid constant exposure and influence, amid learning and practicing repeatedly, they are willingly assimilated. Such a society, culturally and in terms of popular character, is of course a society that is easy to be self-sufficient and tends toward conservatism; thus the meaning of “sticking to the land” rises from the physical to the spiritual. So when Heiwa’s life rises and falls several times and he finally suddenly awakens, bows to Mr. Zhu as his teacher, and decides to reform himself and learn to be a good person, he says: “Anyone who was born on the kang-side ground of White Deer Village—as long as they are human—sooner or later will have to kneel down in the ancestral hall.” This sense of spiritual belonging to the local soil is in fact always linked from the early sense of familiarity; even allowing for the barrier of temporal and spatial distance, it is hard to cut. What is more, this sense of belonging can also be transmitted across generations, so that some people, after living or wandering away from home for several generations, still do not forget where their ancestral home is, even using their ancestral home to mark themselves.
2.3 The superfluity of history and the familiarity of space can be viewed together. Since history is repetitively reenacted and everything is familiar from childhood, then for those living in rural society, the life they see from childhood is their own future life, and the life they will see in the future is their own past life. Time is thus penetrated here, and the present world becomes a slice of the diachronic world. Therefore, in a certain sense, the superfluity of history can be seen as rural society’s sense of familiarity running through time and spreading over history: everything is too familiar and will continue to be performed in the present, so there is no need to write it down; thus history becomes cyclic, patterned, experience-based, and mystified, becoming something that inspires awe. Thus, just as blood relations can project onto territorial relations, the attachment of familiarity with space reflects people’s conviction in familiarity with history.
In such a society, law cannot be produced. Law is the result of strangers in a society making contracts; in the rural world of an acquaintance society, this has neither psychological basis nor necessity. What truly adapts to and is born of rural society is the li-su (rites and customs) accumulated through historical convention. Rites and customs are traditions that have simultaneously undergone the double test of time and practice and are accepted to the greatest extent by rural society; they are people’s trust in history. This kind of tradition exists before a person is born; it is the effective result worked out by ancestors in coping with life in practice; later it is continuously verified repeatedly throughout this person’s life, so that in time it runs from past to present to future, in space from individual to collective to society, and culturally it is gradually endowed with an unbreakable mysterious and sacred coloration, transcending time and space and existing universally. Mr. Zhu, being widely admired on White Deer Plain and regarded as a prophet and sage, can be seen as a representative of “the cultural tradition is here.” In this sense, the Village Compact (Xiangyue) he wrote is, rather than his personal opinion, an expression of this land’s traditional rites and customs, widely accepted by people. So ever since the Village Compact was made, “every night from the ancestral hall of White Deer Village came the rough, deep sound of peasants reciting the Village Compact from memory. From then on, things like stealing chickens and dogs, picking peaches and pinching melons suddenly disappeared.” The irreplaceable role of rites and customs in rural society can be seen from this.
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