The Song Dynasty Conventions System Research

Rural convention is a unique legal and cultural tradition in ancient China andwhich played an important role in the construction of the order of rural community.The convention of Song dynasty, with its clear and distinct characteristics of thetime, takes an outstanding position in the course of the development of China’srural convention because that it is the source of the others. In the research resultsrelated the system of rural convention of Song dynasty, much of the scholars’discussion were limited to that the text and the implementation of the Lv Shi XiangYue, but less mentioned the cultural ideologies behind the text, and the researchresults now available are rarely involved in the exploration from the legal sense orin the explanation of its significance in legal culture. I try putting it in the wholeChinese civilization to evaluate and research the Song dynasty’s system of ruralconvention, and by the comparison of the ideologies on self-governance betweenChina and the Western ,I try to look at the similarities and differences of their ruralself-governance and the relation between the convention and the legal culture, sothat we can provide something inspirational and useful to the construction ofChina’s system of self-governance among villagers.At the first, I research the text of the rural convention of Song dynasty basedon the historical materials, and analyzed the ideological resource and the process ofthe development. The background of the occurrence of the convention is also oneof the most important parts on which I closely treat. Based on the above, I discusthe self-governance’s attribute of the convention Song dynasty. I think the rural community is a local self-government organization in the Song dynasty, and madea detailed argument from its initiator, organization pattern. The convention’sapplication area are limited, and there was big stumbling blocks in the process ofits application so we can observe some flexibility and adjustment in its application.The evaluation and the cultural analysis is the stress of the paper. For the former,we mainly deal with its civilizing and self-governance value and the latter, with theinfluence of the Confucian tradition and neo-Confucianism of Song dynasty.Finally, a comparison between the rural community of song dynasty and theEnglish rural community is made to explore the similarities and differences of theirrural self-governance so that we can make a reconciliation in a deeper-rooted wayto help the construction toward a reasonable pattern as a guidance to the on-goingreform to self-governance among villagers.