The cultural paradigm of a villager exists in every culture, creating a kind of universal archetype that fuels California shopping malls with courtyards and fortune five companies with “mixing areas for the open exchange of ideas”. Man does not like to be alone, and his best work is often accomplished communally. This does not begin to explain, however, the Chinese idea of the “Community Conscience”, which is so vital to the understanding of the concept of face, and is a phenomenon unique to the Chinese cultural evolution.

Chinese villages have existed over the centuries of dynastic change with a relative degree of stability and peace. The Chinese custom of boiling drinking water for tea, only eating cooked food, burning the dead, using outhouses, and salting meat and vegetables put them far ahead of European contemporaries for centuries, enabling them to live happily while plague nearly wiped out the rest of the world. The villages’ life expectancies and birth rates enabled China to amass a large population well before anything similar could be realized in any other country. Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta both remarked that China was an astonishingly safe, stable, agrarian environment where few people were hungry and where the standard of life was surprisingly high.

Villages were stable not only because they were self-contained, but also because they were self-governed. The court, having developed dynastic policy through the Han Dynasty’s canonization of the policies of King Zhou Wen of the Zhou Dynasty, saw their responsibilities primarily as landlords, allowing for fair distribution of property among the peasants, and giving land rights to loyal officials to insure their family’s further loyalty and contribution. They took their rent in crops every year, and left the farmers alone to tend for their farms and families. Forced conscription to military service, the burden of peasants in the west, was seldom if ever required of the poor farmers in dynastic China. The two systems of dynastic China existed in two different dimensions: the court argued about lofty ideals, did little governing for all the perks that it garnered (for Lao Zi had said that “the ideal king does nothing at all”), and skimmed off the cream of the intellectual crop through the court examinations held every three years; and the farmers lived in their clan villages, married, had children, aged and died according to the old rhythms of nature.

In the highly class-conscious Chinese culture, it was almost impossible for a farmer to enter the ethereal realm of the “Nine Dragon Cloud” and get a fair hearing from the “Agents of the Son of Heaven”. Official law was often harsh, and Confucianism promised “No special treatment for the commoner, and no punishment for the Gentleman”, and so the commoner and the peasant avoided the gates of the official judgment hall at all costs, resorting instead to the settlements of village elders, local scholars, or village priests for their small disputes and grievances. My wife’s great-grandfather was an owner of a teashop that doubled as an informal court, in the ancient village of Panlong, near Shanghai. Stories tell that the decision of a tea merchant carried just as much weight as an official judgment, and that it was almost always a fairer deal than you could get from an unscrupulous local government Mandarins, who tended to punish both parties.

Face is essentially a village way of doing things, giving and taking, not according to any real law, but according to a scale of cultural authority, age, financial resource, and/or the aggressiveness of the person being dealt with in the relationship. A general flexibility and amiableness is assumed that is hard for a justice-centered Westerner to tolerate, which is obvious in he way that one in these kinds of negotiations may be required to give in to one whom he knows is wrong, and act happy about it for the good of his village relationships. It is a technique that puts peace and survival as the number one priority, and does not stress being right. It required that one stay likable at all times, even under intense stress or times of need, place family relationships first, and try to please everyone. In the intimate setting of a small village, this is what was needed to survive and maintain close family ties and cross-clan alliances.

The system worked off of a cultivated fear of the power of gossip and ostracism in the villager’s life. Mothers can still be heard telling their children that, if they don’t behave, “People in the other houses will talk about you!” The community reserved the right to protect itself and its relationships through jointly reacting against behavior that the group felt to be irresponsible or dangerous. This is how the compound conscience of these tight-knit communities functioned in keeping the peace and maintaining self-government. As a result, the Chinese not only developed a deep-seated fear of what other people might say about them, but they cultivated a sense of community responsibility that required that they not just listen and obey the general feedback that they heard from others, but that they also freely dispense of similar advice and warnings to their family and friends. These warnings, which are a cultural fixture now, are formalized as a kind of “call and response” that shows the care of the elder for the younger, or a friendly relationship between equals, and can be compared to the darting of fish in a school: they all dart continuously, but only at the same time and in the same direction when a real threat presents itself. Therefore, the Chinese grandmother will continuously remind her grandchildren to be obedient, even if the child is already a model of response to authority, and the father will threaten his children of retribution for bad behavior, even when there is no such bad behavior to be seen. Girls will tell the girl friends to watch out for “color wolves” (young men of evil intent), and boys will joke to each other about finding a “first girl” (a virgin), all as a part of the Chinese culture which uses these kinds of loving reminders to build both solidarity and a sense of communal morality among its members.

This system remained an essentially unchanged model until the large-scale disruptions and starvation of the Second World War. It is no surprise to find, then, that Socialism struck such a resonance with the Chinese farmers, who were by in large displaced and feeling homeless after ten years of running. The Chinese literally flocked to communes when given the opportunity, rather than fleeing them as their Russian comrades had done. The great leader was seen as one of the masses, lifted up to the position that the emperor had once held, but his judgments were motivated towards fairness to the farmer, and his revolution unleashed pent up feelings of bitterness and repression that the village class had kept deep inside their lean gut for centuries. It is little wonder that the cult of Mao quickly replaced all other belief systems, for Mao gave face to the farmer, and they in turn hung his face everywhere as an icon of their gratefulness. To many, a turn to the commune felt like a return to the villages that they fled during the Japanese occupation, and they relished the “Big Pot Rice” that was promised to all those who would work together to build a new China, a China that worked like a village.

The Cultural Revolution is just one illustration of how the Chinese tend to change once they have face. It is seen countless times throughout history, that once someone has “Big Face”, he tends to forget what it felt like to be on the losing side, and becomes quite like the cruel enemy he has defeated. As soon as the farmers were empowered as the judges, their judgments were harsher and the edicts more severe than any the Mandarins ever handed down. Those were years of great suffering for anyone who had been associated with the ruling class of the previous dynasty.

With the Chinese decision to open up towards development in the late 1970’s, under the title of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, the development of factories and the displacement of people from their rural settings into urban sprawl, was immediately felt as a moral crises. The reasons were clear, for a country-raised Chinese, innocence was largely due to lack of exposure. Without the guiding mechanism of the village elders and the fear of loosing face before those that knew him, it was easy to get lost in the morally conundrums of loose living, prostitution or the black market. Anonymity cancels the safeguards that face once gave to the individual through his access to the wisdom and experience of the village. This is true today, as the boys coming out of the country to find work, straight out of high school; lonely and hormonal, they frequent pink-lit salons, and lead the country into an HIV pandemic. They return to the country after their stint in the city to spread the disease at home. Girls who work in beauty parlors, normally sporting tie-dyed hair styles, dye their hair black again and lie to their relatives when they go back at new years, telling them that they work on an assembly-line in a factory, since it is more respectable in their conservative village than working at a beauty parlor (which people associate with pink lights).

Anyone who has traveled China can attest to the extreme contrast that exists in the way people interact with each other between the city and the country. Those in the country treat everyone like family and spend most of their time talking, while those in the city act as if they don’t see each other and silently work. But these contrasts are fading and more and more of China relocates itself to the cities. Cars with country license plates are driven by madmen who run over everything in their paths have become standard on city streets, villages bordering Shanghai are overrun with crowds of young factory workers who get into all kinds of trouble, and who fill the streets at night, leaving a path of destruction behind that rivals a tornado. Vice of every kind infests the city streets to such a degree that illegal behavior often only attracts the shrugs of police officers and officials. There are simply too many people to manage. While the cities are cesspits of opportunism and inhumane behavior, the once content and smiling countryside changes at a startling rate. For now, so many young people have left their villages permanently that the population is quickly aging and dying off. Some say that 80% of China will live in one of five coastal cities within the next ten years. This promises the end of the five thousand year history of Chinese villages within this lifetime.

This shift creates great social turmoil in China, especially because of the language differences and the status consciousness of the Chinese culture. Among the first things that a Chinese will instinctively ask is your place of origin, and this question has much to do with the rules of face. If you are connected somehow to his “Old Home”, you are immediately at a closer level of report than you would be other wise. Deeply ingrained into the Chinese psyche and into the Chinese legal system is the idea of “Hukou”, which can be roughly translated as “Identity” or “Place of Origin”. This is not where one is born, but where one’s family is from. Even in the remarkable homogenous Chinese mainland culture, this difference means all the world by way of acceptance and face. As an extension of the family and clan, the area of one’s family identity is closely tied to personal habits, “Countryside Language”, and the food and entertainment that one enjoys. It is impossible for these “Outsidelanders” to compete with the “Little City People” for face or for favor in official business, and as a result, outsiders tend to stick together against the people they work for and deal with who are indigenous to the area, and the people who hold the keys to economic development, the ancestral resident of Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, feels that these trespassers threaten his very cultural existence and means of survival. There is no love lost between the villagers from the outside and the city-dwellers in China’s big cities.

There are some who propagate the theory that poverty is the source of China’s wandering moral compass, and that social inequality should be blamed for the instability in China’s population. The “Harmonious Society” claims to be a return to a farm-centered government plan, and succinctly proposes that rapid industrial development in backwards areas along with taxation of the port cities in order that the wealth will resolve the problem of slipping character and rampant corruption. The generally accepted theory is that a “modern” standard of life will be quickly followed by a growth in individual character. The saying goes, “When people are hungry they don’t have time to think about doing what’s right.” The problem with this idea is that it does not hold water according to the historical record. China’s villages were models of ethical behavior for the good of the community for thousands of years. China’s peasants did go hungry for a short time in the 1960’s, but it was only for the period of 2 years, and now the Chinese farmer faces the challenge of obesity. The attribution of poor personal choices to buying-power has empowered a whole generation of Chinese young people with a convenient excuse against responsibility. They judge the standard of life by what they see of television, and then feel entitled to these things as a source of happiness through the claims of socialism. If he is not granted what is due him, by the village rules of face, he is allowed retribution. But, against whom and for what reason? Quite simply, against everyone for the crime of deprivation!