A Comparative Study About Rural Cooperation Thought Between Liang Shuming And Fei Xiaotong

Since the twentieth century, Chinese traditional rural society has increasingly declined in the invasion of Western civilization. Taking China's special historical background and social reality into consideration, Liang Shuming and Fei Xiaotong deeply explored Chinese rural cooperation in the process of rural modernization in attempt to promote the countryside modernization with rural cooperative organization. Their ideas of rural cooperation provided us with significant enlightenment in current cooperative organization construction. In this paper, the author applied the method of comparative study and comprehensively investigate the formation idea and the possible practical meaning of their rural cooperation thoughts. The research shows that Liang Shuming and Fei Xiaotong hold different cultural philosophy and have different interpretation of Chinese social characteristic, which eventually lead their different point of the village cooperation practice mode. Specifically speaking, Liang Shuming is a cultural conservatism and illustrated Chinese social structure as ethical-based-pattern, while Fei Xiaotong hold the concept of culture vicissitude and described Chinese social structure as differential pattern. Liang Shuming advocated the continuation of ethical standard and the organization of farmer's cooperation with ethical constrain. He chose cultural improvement path and, as a result, his rural cooperation thought was manifested by a vary of learning activities in Chinese villages and towns. Fei Xiaotong advocated to break the pattern of difference sequence and organized farmers with interests bond. He chose the economic transformation path, and he further clarified the practical frame of his rural cooperation idea with participation in silk cooperative factory. Fundamentally, both Liang Shuming's and Fei Xiaotong's thoughts shared the tendency of one-sidedness and unification, which can not really drive the enthusiasm of farmers in promoting the rural society. The current value of their thoughts lies in the different viewpoint when driving farmers' enthusiasm in current rural cooperative organization.