Linkage: A Study On The Role Of Rural Elite During Organizing The Temple Fair

There are about 3.2 million villages, 600,000 administrative villages, and the number of residents is about 740 million, so the development direction of entire country is decided by rural social stability and development, the construction of the rural social order is of great significance. In traditional China, the rural countries are infiltrated and been relying on the maintenance of order in the "gentry rule" and the traditional moral system, following the principle of "imperial no to county". Since R.O.C, the Government implemented Tithing system in the villages to break the traditional pattern that was formed with rural communities as key political units. After the founding of the PRC, a top-down control of economic control and network administration was created by Communalization to make sure the state power control and infiltrate the countryside to an unprecedented scale and depth. In order to match the household contract responsibility system, the villager self-administration system of"self-control, self-education, self-service"was introduced out of the village until the 1980s. However, since November 4, 1998, the Ninth National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted the fifth meeting of "People's Republic of China Organic Law on Village Committees", the promotion of rural self-government encountered many difficulties in the actual operation, the founding of the economy and administration control network in the rural society seems unprecedented weak, to further increase the possibility of disorder, which caused huge cost of social governance. In the context of this reality, it becomes a common attention for academic and government to explore the reconstruction of the rural social order.Temple ceremony, as the most solemn majority collective cultural activities in rural Chinese society, is reflecting different national historical and cultural heritage of the different regions in divergent regions, can be used to as a perspective for overall outlook of a village or a region's of social life. Since the reform and opening up, China's rural society has been in a state of fracture, peasants turned to be seriously "atomic", the traditional element maintaining local order during thousands of years destructed by modern "life-world colonization" .At the same time, however, a large number of villages who possess rich cultural, organizational, economic or social resources, dedicated to community-based public affairs, alleged as rural elite in this article, are planning the ceremony actively. They dedicated to the activities of the whole organization, making use of all their social networks and resources, and even take the lead in fund-raising ceremony at the cost of money in order to mobilize the broad masses to participate their ceremony, which filled the deserted spiritual life of the villages in the community with the cultural life, showed the vitality of the order in the village. Meanwhile, in the process of shaping "quasi-moral community" through common belief to the Village God, the rural elites has linked all community residents into a "group discussion, person responsible for all the people involved in" grass-roots self-organization spontaneously, which provide a reality specimens that the villages explore the internal resources for self-made organization.Based on a case occurred in certain rural area in the northwest, this study attached attentions to social facts including the funeral and marriage ceremony, especially well-planned group activities of temple fairs in recent years, observed the "leader" role via dual role of insiders and outsiders, collected first-hand information on the completion of the participant observation, and placed them in the framework of sociological theories and methods, defined concepts and made scientific theory ponder. The full text was divided into six chapters: Chapter I "Introduction" reviewed the relevant research results, clarified the purpose and significance of the study to define the main concept, the research methods chose, and finally the idea of coverage of the study. Chapter II, "Renaissance: the temple ceremony in full swing," according to interviews, described the traditional and modern Z temple ceremony in the village. Chapter III "Fracture: the evolution of rural communities in the Northwest" deposed at changes of the Chinese countryside society, role-playing of the rural elite in the process of continuing orders was focused, the current image of the villages was analyzed. Chapter IV "Link: Public affairs elite mobilization" began in the funeral and marriage ceremony of villages, then extended to the temple ceremony, in the light of Weber's model, the legitimacy of the leadership of elites was classified, their mechanism and function detailed. Chapter V "Polymerization: endogenous recycling of organic unity of the community" was in the perspective of the role integration and functional coupling, explored the rural elite how to mobilize the masses to participate in the community. Chapter VI, "Conclusions and discussion" summarized the overall study and put forward the lack of research and theoretical point of further study.