Mr. Fei Xiaotong is an internationally renowned scholar and one of the founders of Chinese sociology and anthropology.
Text/Fei Xiaotong
Why do Chinese love to take advantage of the public?
In the eyes of rural workers, the biggest problem of Chinese rural people is "selfishness". Speaking of selfishness, we think of the saying that "each sweeps the snow in front of the door by himself, and does not care about the frost on the house of others". No one dares to deny that this saying is more or less the creed of Chinese.
In fact, it is not only the countrymen who hold this attitude, but also the so-called urban people. The people who clear the snow in front of their doors are still great people with public morality, and ordinary people dump garbage on the street in front of them, and they are finished.
Suzhou people often pass through a river at the back door, it sounds the most beautiful and there is no more, the literati pen and ink is the Venice of China, but I think there is no dirtier waterway in the world than the waterway in Suzhou City. Anything can fall into this small ditch where the way out is not very smooth, and many people do not have to have a toilet at all.
Knowing that people wash and wash vegetables in this river, they don't feel that there is anything that needs to be made. Why? - This small river is public. When it is said that it is public, it almost means that everyone can take advantage of a little, and they have rights but no obligations.
As small as the courtyard where two or three families live together, the public corridor is as usual dust and dust, and there is wild grass in the courtyard, no one wants to pull it out clearly, and the more difficult to insert is naturally the toilet. No family is willing to take care of "nosy", and whoever is not accustomed to it will have to serve people in vain, and half thanks will not be obtained. So like Glenham's public law, bad money drives out good money, and here the public morality is driven away by selfishness.
In terms of these things, the problem of selfishness is much more common in China than that of foolishness and disease, and there seems to be nothing from top to bottom that does not harm this disease. Now it has become the handle for foreign public opinion to unanimously attack us. The so-called corruption and incompetence is not a matter of everyone's absolute ability, but relative, from the perspective of personal service and responsibility to the public.
Chinese is not bad at management, as long as you look at the achievements of those overseas Chinese in Nanyang in business, who in the West does not look sideways? Chinese is not incompetent, for their own affairs, grab money, shoot horses, than the people of any country are more capable. Therefore, the so-called "private" problem here is a question of how to draw the line between the group and the self.
Our traditional zoning is obviously different from the Western zoning. Therefore, if we want to discuss private issues, we have to consider the pattern of the whole social structure.
The West is a group society, we are a circle society.
Western society is a bit like we bundle firewood in the field, a few straw bundles into a handful, a few bundles into a bundle, a few bundles into a bundle, a few bundles into a pick. Each stick of wood belongs to a certain bundle, tie, and handle in the whole pick. Every stick of firewood can also be found with the same handle, the same tie, the same bundle of firewood, and the distribution will not be chaotic.
In society, these units are groups. When I say that Western organizations are like bundles of firewood, I want to point out that they are often formed into groups of several people. Groups have certain boundaries, who are the people in the group and who are the people outside the group, can not be blurred, must be clearly distinguished.
The people in the group are a group, the relationship with the group is the same, and if there is a difference in groups or ranks in the same group, it is also prescribed first. I use bundles of firewood as an analogy, and one thing is not quite right, that is, a person can participate in several groups, and it is of course impossible to have a single stick of firewood in several bundles of firewood, which is the difference between people and firewood.
I use this metaphor to think specifically of a pattern that allows us to see the relationship between man and man in social life. We might as well call it a group structure. The family is a well-defined group in the West.
In our local society, each family takes its own position as the center, and draws a circle around it, and this circle is a "neighborhood". There are happy events to ask for wine, children to send red eggs, funerals to come out to help, carry coffins, is a mutual aid agency in life. But this is not a fixed group, but a scope.
The size of the range also depends on the thickness of the central power. The neighborhoods of powerful people can spread throughout the village, and the neighborhoods of poor people are only two or three neighbors. This is the same as our circle of relatives. Like the Jia family's Grand View Garden, you can live with your cousin Lin Daiyu, your aunt Xue Baochao, and later more, what Baoqin, Xiuyun, all those who can pull relatives, are tolerant.
But as soon as the power changed, the tree fell and scattered, shrinking into a small ball. At the extreme, it can be like Su Qinluan returning, "The wife does not think of her husband, and the sister-in-law does not think of herself as an uncle." "The differential order pattern in the traditional Chinese structure has this ability to scale.
In the countryside, families can be small, while rich landlords and bureaucrats can be as large as a small country. Chinese also have a special feeling about the cold state of the world, because this flexible social circle will be sized by the change of central forces.
In Western societies where children have to pay their parents for food and lodging when they reach adulthood, the boundaries of groups are recognized. There are certain qualifications in the group. If you disqualify, you have to get out of this group. In them it is not a matter of human warmth and coldness, but a question of rights. In Western society, we are fighting for rights, but in our case, we are building relationships and talking about friendship.
Taking "self" as the center, throwing into the water like a stone, and the social relations associated with others are not like the molecules in the group, everyone stands on a plane, but like the ripples of water, the circle is pushed out, pushing farther and farther, and pushing thinner and thinner.
Source: Network