From Fei Xiaotong's Rural China to Xu Zhuoyun's Island Society

Both Fei Xiaotong and Xu Zhuoyun are respected sociologists. Peasant Life in China and From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society are Fei's best-known works, while Xu's may be Watching America, Watching China, and Rivers Without End. I have read both scholars' books and like them. But they represent different eras, and the two different eras they describe I have both lived through.

The China of my childhood was exactly the "rural China" Fei Xiaotong wrote of. Most of us lived in the countryside; there were plenty of conflicts in village relationships, but on the whole rural households and people were closely connected and harmonious. If my parents were not home, I need not worry about going hungry; I could eat at my uncle's or at a neighbor's house.

When we worked, it was both hard and cheerful. My father was a humorous man with a belly full of jokes; when we worked in the fields, neighboring plots had whole families working too. Rural people have loud voices, and as they worked they teased one another and told all kinds of jokes—of course nothing unsuitable for children, because every family's field had children in it.

Then our land had to be plowed by oxen, and one household keeping an ox was too heavy a burden, so several families shared one ox. The families sharing an ox had to divide, according to each household's cultivated area, how many days each month each took turns grazing it. In the countryside, cooperation between people was close, so few fell into serious disputes. When a husband and wife quarreled, neighbors would come to mediate. Venerable elders would even criticize the party in the wrong, using their prestige to make the wrong party admit fault and apologize, so divorce was rare. Because we lived clustered by clan, there were many relatives in the village; in-laws were mostly from nearby villages, and at weddings, funerals, and other major events, relatives and neighbors would all come to help and celebrate, with a dozen or so banquet tables.

Today this rural society is gradually declining. Most young people have left their hometowns, and even some middle-aged and elderly people who are still physically capable have gone elsewhere to make a living. So we have entered the new era Xu Zhuoyun described, no longer remaining in the rural China of Fei Xiaotong.

Middle-aged people like me, now in our forties, probably feel this most deeply. We left the countryside for the cities, leaving behind the familiar web of relationships and unable to rebuild such a vast social support system in the big cities. Some people like this change very much because they prefer simpler relationships—myself, for one. But more people feel deeply lost in this change, because their inner strength is not enough; they need the company and support of relatives and friends.

China is now walking the road Xu Zhuoyun described America as walking in the 1970s–90s: people are becoming lonelier and lonelier, some past "respectable people" have gradually fallen behind amid the great social transformation and become the new social underclass. Individuals and small families are becoming ever more isolated; many people need the internet to get through their bored lives. Over time, even at the dinner table everyone stares at a phone, and family members barely speak. As productivity rises and living conditions improve, life expectancy grows and people have more and more free time, yet do not know how to spend it. The internet arrived just in time to catch their attention.

Xu Zhuoyun describes today's society as becoming an island society, each person an island. Those born after the 1990s may have been in this state since birth, so they can hardly imagine a time when their parents lived in extended families. People born in the 1980s or earlier, for their part, cannot easily accept the individualism of the post-90s, which seems to them too selfish, too little yielding and tolerant.

Someone like me, born in the late 1970s in the countryside and now living in a first-tier city, has lived two kinds of life. We have a hometown we cannot return to and a new hometown we are gradually adapting to. At Spring Festival we can temporarily slip back into our old circle and enjoy a few cheerful days. Though the circle we return to has actually changed beyond recognition, it still satisfies our emotional needs.

I have never seen as many depressed patients as now; in recent years depression has grown like a volcanic eruption. Whether in the countryside or the city, there are far too many young and old living alone; the old social support system has collapsed, while a new one cannot yet be built. Parents of the post-00 generation sigh that their children are too addicted to the internet, but they do not realize how lonely the children are; leave the internet aside and the children have basically no social life. Their classmates no longer live in the same village or courtyard but in different neighborhoods, and after school they can hardly get together to play.

Though I like being alone, I am glad to offer my son's classmates a place to gather—our small dwelling. This place, under sixty square meters, is often where my son's classmates hold lively gatherings. Whenever his classmates come over in groups (mostly to play games together), his mother and I go to the market to buy dishes to entertain these young guests. I rarely interfere with their entertainment; after all, I played as a child too, and I know that only a child who has enjoyed the fun of group recreation will grow up to love his own life. But I also limit my son's screen time and do not allow him to stay up too late.

Urban young people are becoming more and more "Buddhist," liking dan-sha-li (decluttering). To explain this phenomenon, a childhood friend of mine now in finance put it: as adults, our ideals have been defoamed. Indeed, the colorful fantasies of our childhood have shattered one by one in real life—had they not, I myself might have been a Napoleon or a Washington; clearly our peaceful age has no use for a warmonger like me, and I am glad to see my "heroism" have no battlefield.

At the same time that our fantasies shattered, we also lost that vast social support system. Our parents' generation also lived through an age of shattered illusions, but their lives were not lacking in close relatives, friends, and neighbors, and they could gather to chat about everything or laugh at themselves, easily dispelling their inner loss. Urban young people, meanwhile, can only live amid the wine-glasses and the glittering modern life while, consciously or unconsciously, drifting toward philosophy or religion, seeking a spiritual harbor after the hangover.

China's disease spectrum is quietly changing; in the next decade we will enter an era in which depression has leapt to the head of all diseases. Humans are social animals; when a fragile social support system can no longer prop up modern people, who live ever longer, people's spirits will develop problems. This is an age-specific affliction, the same around the globe. Xu Zhuoyun believes that the world's current forms of social organization all have major problems—there is too little real contact between people. Our society and economy are developing, but people's spiritual habitat—the network of relationships—has been devastated.

For me personally, the rural China of Fei Xiaotong lies twenty years back, while the island society of Xu Zhuoyun has appeared in my life in the last ten-plus years. I am a person who has all he needs in books; the breadth of my reading is enough to fill my free time and settle my mind. I am full of interest in TCM, Western medicine, biology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, religion, and literature, so though I live in my own island I am not lonely. But people keep coming to know me through the internet, hoping to rest here a moment when they are spiritually weary. Many of my relatives and friends are also in spiritual distress, so I do not like to see the formation of an island society; I hope everyone under heaven can be happy.

It is hard to imagine: humanity's population exceeds that of any period in history, yet our loneliness index may be the highest ever. Our modern society is not even as warm and connected as tribal society.

The isolation caused by lack of communication between people has also made society more fractured. After thirty, I gradually lost interest in online discussions, because the internet is full of hate speech—netizens around the world hate almost everything. Without the deterrent of law, the opposing sides would probably stage a bloody duel at any moment. So I have long stopped using popular tools like Weibo and Douyin; I only use WeChat for work. In most cases I keep my article comment sections closed, because I do not want to waste my life on meaningless arguments with people who have no spiritual anchor.

If I live to eighty, perhaps I will witness the birth of another social model. I hope that, after experiencing Fei's rural China and Xu's island society, I can also experience a social model better than these two. Perhaps in my old age I, like Fei and Xu, will write down my life's experiences and reflections in a book; I hope that, when I write such a book, most people can be happy.