"Learn To Be The Old Man":the Elderly Crisis In Rural Areas Under The Vision Of Family Transformation

Based on the field investigation of rural area in northern China,under the background of modernity into the village,this article takes the family reproduction as the analysis framework,through interpreting the mechanism and path of the peasant family transformation,showing the generation logic of the current elderly crisis in rural areas.Since the 1980s,relying on marketization and urbanization,the strength of modernity has swept across the rural areas,and triggered the change the infrastructure of rural society.In the field of village society,the liquid modernity has restored the peasants' living system,and formed a "flow-differentiation" social structure,a "development-competition" power structure,and a "demystification-risk" ideational structure.In response to the change of living system under the pressure of modernity,the peasant's family reproduction has gradually changed from simple family reproduction to expanded family reproduction,which has changed the configuration logic of resources,power and ethics in the family,and reshaped the path of the farmers' "ageing".Therefore,this thesis mainly follows two clues of bright andshade.Among them,the "process-mechanism" analysis of expanded family reproduction constitutes the bright line of this paper,and ultimately points to the peasants' family mechanism and the practice form of the transformation family;during the intergenerational interaction in the family reproduction,the process and path of the parents' "ageing"constitutes the hidden line of this paper,and eventually formed the elderly crisis.The expanded family reproduction has presented the adaptation to modernity of peasants'family from a microcosmic angle.In terms of property allocation,the parents' try to gather resources and transfer resources to their offspring through the way of "separation in advance",which leading to the separation is not in consistent with its essence,and blurring out the boundary of parents' responsibility of the separation,and forming the child-centered resources agglomeration.In the aspect of family power,the rise of women's marriage initiative has made the offspring to capture the right to charge in family quickly,and disorganized the publicity of the right to charge in family,which resulting in the imbalances of family politics gradually.In order to maintain the stability of family reproduction,parents have withdrew from the interaction of family politics with their offspring consciously,thus realizing the child-centered integration of power relations.In the aspect of family ethics,the embedding of developmentalism has reconstructed the target of family reproduction,and also triggered the diastasis between ethics standard and family standard.The ethical practice by parents has constituted the strong power of the expanded family reproduction.In fact,the individual "aging" is not only a natural biological evolution process,and it obtained abundant content because of embedding the family reproduction.In the process of expanded family reproduction,the parents' "aging" embodies in three aspects:they gradually move towards to the bottom line to survive during the property transferring,they also move towards to the marginalized status during the power transferring,and finally they move towards to the attachment of offspring in the process of value realization.Therefore,the process of parents' "ageing" is actually the process of its capacity preemption,power conveyance and value dependent.The three venation of "ageing" has formed the basis of understanding the current elderly crisis in rural areas.Based on the intergenerational difference within the old groups,"ageing"is not only a process of longitudinal weakness accumulation based on the middle-aged people.And the unique path of "ageing" and their pressure of the middle-aged people will pass up in the process of expanded family reproduction,thus making the elderly also be involved.Therefore,the longitudinal weakness accumulation and the lateral pressure transmission constitute the two generated paths of elderly crisis.The generation logic of elderly crisis highlights the complex mechanisms of family transformation in rural areas of China.The transition from the simple family reproduction to expanded family reproduction shows that,the function of the peasant' family does not weaken necessarily with the entering of modernity.The Chinese family system shows a considerable flexibility,and shapes the practice form of family transformation-"functional family".Being different from the traditional family system of "ethics-structure-function" mode which be dominated by the ethics,the pressure of the modernity has activated the function dimension of family.The function substitutes the family ethics and becomes the foundation of family system,and it also changed the orientation and way of implementation of family ethics.Through such an adaptive adjustment,the "function-structure-ethics" matching mode has been formed.The expanded family reproduction has overcame the ethical burden of the unbalanced allocation between resources and power,and the family reproduction also be legitimated.Functional family is the core to understand the modernization transformation of Chinese family,which highlights the complex association between "traditional" factors and "modern"factors rather than simple opposing during the family transformation.The elderly crisis in rural society which embedded in the family transformation reveals the ethical trap of family transformation,and the elderly crisis has been locked in the field of family.Therefore,the current academic circles has constructed the elderly crisis as "social problems" from the perspective of poverty problem,remaining problem and ethical crisis,which has failed to touch the profundity and dialectical nature of the elderly crisis.The agony of transformation which takes the elderly crisis as the basic form actually foreshows and carries the dream of transformation of farmers and rural society.