传统中国是否存在村落共同体——对长达半世纪的一段学术争论的再讨论

Did Village Communities Exist in Traditional China:Revisiting a Half-century-long Academic Controversy

20世纪40年代,日本学者基于对中国农村的调查,就中国是否存在村落共同体进行了针锋相对的争论,持续时间长达半个世纪之久。当年运用共同体理论对调查作出概括,有其学术价值,但也存在对共同体理论的简单理解和以有限事实作出简单结论的局限性。因此,需要在深化对经典共同体理论认识的基础上,从个体与整体的关系及其变迁维度理解共同体理论的丰富性和动态性,包括:共同体概念界定的多维性,共同体形式的多样性;共同体具有动态性,共同体构建的行动性;共同体达成的治理性,共同体实现的目标性。通过2015年启动的“深度中国调查”,可以发现中国的村落社会形态及其共同体的形式具有丰富性、进化性和非均衡性的特点。社会分化程度愈低,共同体的自然属性愈高;社会分化程度愈高,共同体的人为构建属性愈强。

In the 1940s,Japanese scholars conducted heated debates on the existence of village communities in China based on their surveys of Chinese rural villages,which lasted for half a century.While there was academic value in applying community theory to summarize the surveys at that time,there were limitations due to their simplistic understanding of community theory and straightforward conclusions based on insufficient facts.Therefore,it is necessary to understand the richness and dynamism of community theory from the relationship between the individual and the whole and its changing dimensions based on an in-depth understanding of the classical community theory.These include the multidimensionality in defining the community concept,the diversity of the community forms,the dynamism possessed by the community,the action in constructing the community,the governance created by the community,and the target realized by the community.Through the“In-depth China Survey”launched in 2015,we can find that the social and community forms of Chinese villages are characterized by richness,evolution,and imbalance.The lower the degree of social differentiation,the higher the natural attributes of the community;the higher the degree of social differentiation,the stronger the artificially constructed attributes of the community.