The Chinese People

In population and power, ancient China was the equal of the Roman Empire, which met its doom in the 5th century. While China undergoing numerous rises and declines still exists in the east of the world, making contributions to the human progress along with all other races and nations.

For the people in the West ,the more important facts about China are the vast number of its population, their very different ways of life which distinguishes culturally from that of the Westerners throughout history. China can be best understood through her history for the following reasons:

1) The Chinese people which cover more than 1/5 of the people of the world see themselves in historical perspective. They are strongly aware of their heritage.

2) Their distinctive aesthetic intellectual and institutional achievements can best be studied as they evolved. Only as one looks at the long flow of their history can one perceive her directions of motion and have some understanding of what is happening in China today.

The essence of present ferment in China is the interaction between new forces many of which were derived from the west, and traditional habits as well as the mode of thinking. On the one hand there is the evolution of the traditional Chinese civilization in over three thousand years of isolation, and on me other hand there are upheavals and transformation of the civilization in Modern times, partly in response to the contact with the western world.

In the decade since 1979, the Chinese revolution has turned another corner. The so-called cultural revolution during the period of 1966-1976 has been repudiated. China's goal of economic modernization has replaced the old concept of stress on the class struggle. Foreign trade and investment ,entrepreneur ship in the countryside, less concern of ideology, the establishment of me special economic zones, market economy, the stock exchange and many other things have shown China's vitality.

It's interesting to make comparison between the West civilization and that of the east which chiefly is represented by the Chinese Civilization. Western civilization grew up in closely connected areas such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. Only after it had spread to include most of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia did it divide into its two present halves: the Christian civilization and Islamic Civilization in the east. Let's look back to China, the only east Asian civilization in North China was isolated by natural barriers. To the west, there are the Himalayas, me Tibetan Plateau and the huge mountain chains that radiate from the roof of the world. To the north are vast deserts and steppes. To the south are rugged mountains and jungles. And to the east there is boundless sea.

As an isolated society, China's greatest natural resource has always been her agricultural lands. The material foundation of the Chinese society in history is agriculture. That's why the Chinese society was given another name: the agricultural society. The production relationship in the vast rural areas of China through several thousand years until me eve of me founding of the PRC had been that of the landlords and their tenants. Land owning was the main goal of economic endeavors and investments. The peasants might have to pay as much as half of their crops to the landlord.

Under-developed agricultural production together with poor transportation means made a typical de-centralized market pattern. A rural market center and its surrounding villages within walking distance formed a unit that could live by itself, with a high degree of inertia in spite of wars, invasions and great social changes in the administrative centers where history was recorded.

The agrarian reform after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) which uprooted the landlord class brought a fundamental change to the traditional economic order of the Chinese peasantry. The years from 1953 to 1957 saw the rapid increase of agricultural production. In the late 50s, the establishment of the people's commune, a product of extreme leftist line which overestimated the peasants' collective consciousness and frustrated their working enthusiasm, led to disastrous consequences. Agricultural production declined year after year . The dissolution of people's commune brought about rapid restoration of agricultural production.

With the implementation of the policy of reform and opening to the outside world and the economic development that followed, numerous township enterprises were set up, transportation conditions have been greatly improved, the rural communities are no longer isolated. Millions of working hands have been attracted to leave the land to seek job opportunities in cities and towns.

All these changes produced two results.

1. The active part of the rural population are on the move;

2. the sources of household income become diversified. These phenomena have great impact on the stability of traditional multi-generation household patterns in the countryside.