A way of asking

Now there is a kind of person who, around forty, starts thinking about going back to the old home village later. Grow some vegetables, keep a few chickens, know all the neighbors, fresh air, slow pace.

And there is another kind who shakes their head at the thought. Village obligations are heavy; whose house went up, whose child did well on the exams, all of it gets compared. A saying one often hears: "laugh at those who have less, resent those who have more." Add that the hospital is far and the children are not around.

Neither is lying. They are speaking of the same thing, one of its good side, the other of its bad. This thing has a ready name: "Rural China."

The question is: is it still there? And if not, when did it go, and why?

What Fei Xiaotong wrote

From the Soil (Xiangtu Zhongguo) is a work of Fei Xiaotong's from the 1940s. He taught "rural sociology" at the Southwest Associated University, wrote his thoughts from class into essays, published fourteen of them in Shiji pinglun, and in 1948 Shanghai's Guanchashe published them as a book.

His point: the base of China is "of the soil." People live off farming; land does not move, so people do not move much; they live their lives in one place, and everyone in the village knows everyone, which is called an "acquaintance society." Relations are like ripples when a stone is dropped in water, centered on oneself, spreading out ring by ring, which is the "differential mode of association." What governs is not law but rules everyone recognizes, the words of elders, rites learned from childhood, which the book calls "rule by ritual."

One thing first: this is a book about a "type," not a statistical report. Scholars still argue over how exactly to define "rural" and the "differential mode." We use it as a ruler: taking rural China as it was, and seeing how this ruler later grew shorter.

Several threads cut

Rural China did not collapse on a single day. It is like a cloth from which warp and weft are pulled one by one. I will lay out the timeline first, and speak of the heaviest thread separately afterward.

1905: the channel cut

On 2 September 1905 (the fourth day of the eighth month, Guangxu 31), the Qing court issued an edict: from 1906, provincial and metropolitan examinations would cease, as would the annual and subject examinations in the provinces. It had been proposed jointly by ministers including Yuan Shikai and Zhang Zhidong. The examination system, in place for about thirteen hundred years, ended there.

People at the time felt it. Yan Fu said it was "the greatest act in our country in several thousand years"; a Shanxi juren named Liu Dapeng wrote worry in his diary. (I am relaying both; I have not read the originals.)

Worried about what? The historian Luo Zhitian has a view: the examinations were not only for selecting officials; they had another function, "connecting high and low." Traditional scholars spoke of "tilling and reading," mostly studying in the countryside, going to the city to be officials after passing, and returning home when they retired or to mourn. People, information and money circulated between city and village this way.

When the examinations were abolished, the channel was cut. Luo says the new-style schools turned education from "private" into "public," it became harder for poor families' children to study, the number of rural scholars shrank, and literacy fell; the graduates of the new schools learned things villagers did not recognize and did not want to stay, so they went to the city.

Reading this I think of the old teachers who lost their place. They were not opposing anything; the thing they had learned all their lives became useless overnight.

The Qing court itself made this cut, driven by outside pressure. But the countryside did not scatter because of it. The gentry were still there, the lineage was still there, the ancestral halls were still there; they just could no longer go up, and could no longer come back.

The state begins to reach in

Rural China originally had a middle layer: gentry, lineage heads, men of standing. They stood between state and peasants, doing the state's business on one side and speaking for the village on the other.

The historian Prasenjit Duara studied North China villages and said the state, to collect more tax and do more things, reached into the villages and the effect was the opposite: the old "protective" local leaders, unwilling to squeeze their neighbors for the state, withdrew one by one, and "profit-seeking" ones took their place, earning money by skimming. The further the state reached down, the more the countryside was squeezed, and the cultural bond between state and peasant snapped. He called this "state involution." (I read Chinese commentary, not the original.)

In this step the gentry were slowly replaced. The next step was not replacing; it was tearing down.

The spark was class struggle

Hunan, 1927

In 1927 Mao Zedong went back to Hunan and spent thirty-two days in the countryside, then wrote the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. One section is titled "Overthrow the local tyrants and evil gentry, all power to the peasant association."

I quote the most important lines from the original (the 1927 text, not the later revised version in the Selected Works):

With the gentry's power toppled, the peasant association became the only organ of authority, and "all power to the peasant association" was truly achieved. Even a petty quarrel between husband and wife must be settled at the peasant association. (my translation)

In the second period, we must establish the peasants' absolute power, we must not allow criticism of the peasant association, we must overthrow all gentry power, beat the gentry to the ground, even trample them underfoot. ... In a word, every village must create a brief reign of terror; without that we can never suppress the counter-revolutionaries in the villages, or overthrow gentry power. To straighten what is bent one must overcorrect; without overcorrecting one cannot straighten. (my translation)

Compare Fei Xiaotong. In his book, when a "husband and wife quarrel" in the rural society, a man of prestige is invited to judge; "rule by ritual" relies on elders, on moral teaching, on rules everyone recognizes. This 1927 report describes how that position changed hands: the judge went from the gentry to the peasant association, and the source of the rules from "ritual everyone recognizes" to "must not allow criticism."

This was 1927, twenty-two years before 1949.

1950: giving everyone a class label

In August 1950 the Government Administration Council issued the Decision on Defining Class Status in the Countryside. (The dates of adoption and promulgation are given as 4 August and 20 August in two accounts.) By land ownership and whether one worked the land oneself, rural people were sorted into landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant and hired laborer. In June of the same year the Land Reform Law said in Article 1 that the landlord class's feudal exploitative land ownership was abolished and peasant land ownership established; Article 3 said: "Confiscate the lands of ancestral halls, temples, monasteries, churches, schools and organizations in the countryside, and other public lands."

The peasants who received land really received land, and I will come back to that below. But the matter of class status reclassified a village: from then on, who you were depended not only on which family you belonged to and what your generation was, but also on your class status.

The sociologists Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping, studying "speaking bitterness" in land reform, put it precisely: speaking bitterness takes the sufferings of peasants' daily lives and connects them to the "state" through the intermediate category of "class." People thus became "members of a class," "the people," "the masses," not "citizens" in the modern sense; their idea of the state was a "gratitude type." (From the abstract; I have not read the original in History and Society, 2002.) Another scholar's commentary says speaking bitterness was "a psychological mobilization technique for drawing poor peasants into the rural class struggle planned by the Party."

The original thread of rural society was centered on "self," ring by ring outward: family, lineage, village, township. Speaking bitterness and class status pulled another thread outside those rings: whether you and he are of the same class.

In September 1962, the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee proposed "never forget class struggle." After that came the "Socialist Education Movement" (the Four Cleanups) in town and country, and later the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Only in December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, was it decided to stop using the slogan "take class struggle as the key link."

From 1962 to 1978 is sixteen years; from 1950, twenty-eight. About as long as a person takes to be born, grow up, marry and have children. The whole formative period of this generation was spent under that slogan.

What is inside people

Here I want to turn to the matter of hearts.

I believe that the heaviest thing in all this is not how many ancestral halls were torn down or how much lineage land was confiscated, but that the line between person and person was cut: mutual guarding, mutual denunciation, more intense than in any other period of history. This is my judgment; nobody has measured it; one cannot compare headcounts; what can be compared is institutions.

In Qin, under Shang Yang's reforms, there was a "denounce wrongdoers" order: those who did not denounce were cut in half at the waist, those who denounced were rewarded as those who took enemy heads, and those who hid wrongdoers were punished as those who surrendered to the enemy. (Records of the Grand Historian, "Biography of Lord Shang," via citation.) This is a famous case of making denunciation law, with heavy rewards and punishments.

But from Emperor Xuan of Han another thread joined. In the fourth year of Dijie (66 BCE), an edict said: "The closeness of father and son, the way of husband and wife, are nature." From then on a son hiding his parents, a wife hiding her husband, a grandson hiding his grandparents were not prosecuted; parents, husband or grandparents hiding children, wife or grandchildren short of capital crimes were also not prosecuted. This is "mutual concealment among kin" (qinqin xiangyin); the Confucian line "the father conceals for the son, the son for the father" was written into state law for the first time. Later the Tang code has "those who live together may conceal for one another," and the Song and Ming codes have similar provisions. (From scholarly surveys; I have not read the originals.) That is to say: for two thousand years after Qin, the law always left a gap for family: you may not denounce him.

By contrast, in contemporary law, only in the 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law (Article 188, which became Article 193 in 2018) was it written that if a witness without good reason fails to appear in court, the court may compel attendance, except for the defendant's spouse, parents and children. The explanation for the draft gave as reason that "compelling spouse, parents and children to testify against the defendant in court is not conducive to maintaining family relations." Some scholars say this was the first time criminal trial took the maintenance of family relations into consideration, and that it is still not a full right to refuse to testify. (From surveys.)

Whether between 1949 and 2012 the law ever left such a gap for relatives, I did not find the text. All I can say here is: that is an account that could be checked.

One more lead is from the internet. In the discussion of this question there is a comment with 77 likes: "The Confucius-obsessed spent several thousand years and never managed the trick of getting husbands, wives and children to denounce one another on a mass scale." That is one netizen's statement, and I take it as a lead, not as evidence.

What is left now

The sociologist Wu Chongqing gave today's village a name: "acquaintance society without a subject." Young and middle-aged adults are long absent; people still live in the village and all still know one another, but the "subjects" of the village, those who can handle things, speak, and hold up a front, have gone out. His summary: public opinion fails, "face" loses value, social capital disperses. (From a survey of his work; I have not read the original in Dushu, 2011.)

After 1980 the people's communes were withdrawn one by one, government and commune were separated, township governments were rebuilt, and villages set up villagers' committees. By 1985, more than 56,000 people's communes became more than 91,000 township governments, with over 940,000 villagers' committees below. (Figures are relayed.) The state took one step back from the villages, and no one took the place it vacated.

Then people left. The share of rural population in the country was about 82% at the end of 1978, about 71% at the end of 1995, and about 32% at the end of 2025. Today China has nearly 300 million migrant workers, of whom more than 170 million have left their home township. From the early 2000s, rural schools were merged in large numbers, and from 2013 to 2024 rural primary schools fell by more than half (see "The Village Schools"). From 1 January 2006 the agricultural tax was fully abolished, ending more than two thousand six hundred years of "imperial grain and national tax." That is a good thing. But it also meant that the last thread between the state and each peasant household that they touched once a year was gone.

Power inside the home also changed hands. Yan Yunxiang followed Xiajia village in his native Heilongjiang for more than ten years and wrote The Transformation of Private Life. He says the old household was a pyramid with three supports: generation, age and sex. Collectivization smashed it once, and after the 1980s the one-child policy and population movement together pushed the center of power down to the younger generation, forming an inverted "4-2-1" pattern; villagers said: grandfather becomes grandson, and women rise to the sky. (From reviews and interviews; I have not read the book.)

Having got this far, return to the question at the start.

Some say the pressure of favors in the village is heavy; whose house goes up, whose child studies, everything is compared, "laugh at those who have less, resent those who have more." Some say the village's moral pressure is already far weaker than before and face is worth nothing. I think both are right.

My reading is: comparison and gossip are still there; the net underneath is gone. In the old countryside you were watched, but you also had people behind you: the lineage had charity land, the ancestral hall had common property, the lineage head came forward to mediate, in old age you had children and grandchildren, and when you died there was someone to sacrifice to you. Today the circle is still there, the circle of acquaintances in the village; but the things inside the circle that did the managing have gone one by one. The net underneath, in the end, depends on trust: you trust that when something happens to you someone will reach out a hand. This reading is my own inference; no study says it so directly.

Today's old home: what research says

Back to the two kinds of people at the start, those who long and those who fear. I went looking for research to see whether anyone has measured "empty nests," "favors," and "how old people live." The conclusion first: some of it has been measured, some not.

Empty nests. The often-quoted "over 70% of rural elderly are empty-nesters" traces, as far as I found, to a 2022 statement by an official of the Ministry of Civil Affairs: among the nation's elderly, empty-nest elderly are more than half, and in some big cities and rural areas more than 70%. That is an official statement with no survey data attached, speaking of "some areas," not the national rural average. Definitions are also muddled: some count "living only with a spouse" as empty-nest, others only those living alone. The figure from the 2019 national rural fixed observation points is that among rural families with elderly members, 12.9% are one elderly person living alone and 34.3% are several elderly persons living together, together 47.2% (a household measure, not a personal one). (From secondary relays; I have not read the original table.)

Favors. Yan Yunxiang did fieldwork in Xiajia village in Heilongjiang from 1989 to 1991 and wrote The Flow of Gifts. He says the gifts sent out in the village are gifts of renqing (human feeling), the return gifts repay renqing debts, and closeness follows the differential mode; giving gifts to village cadres actually reproduces the hierarchy between cadres and ordinary villagers. (From reviews; I have not read the book.) At the other end, Xi Chen did a study using long-term gift records of rural households: the more central a household in the gift network, the more informal insurance it gets; the same study also says economic inequality and competition in the marriage market are the main influences on the structure of gift networks. (From the abstract.) A conference paper using a nationally representative survey says that in the one survey year it used, 87% of households had gift exchanges, and gifts in a year (cash and in kind) averaged about 2,013 yuan, 11.7% of that year's per-capita income. (Only the abstract read.) The account of favors has an insurance side and a burden side.

Old people's lives. The most painful set comes from research on elderly suicide in the countryside. Liu Yanwu compiled data from several regions: in the 1980s, among rural suicides young people made up about 59% and elderly about 24%; in the decade after 2000, young people were only about 9% and the elderly about 79%. (This is a compilation of regional cases, not a national sample; officially, elderly suicides are often registered as "natural deaths," so the numbers may still be understated.) In his 2008 survey in Jingshan, Hubei, He Xuefeng found a rule unfavorable to the elderly there: old people should not expect too much from their children and should not burden them when ill; suicide was often understood as "for the children's good." Villagers did not blame the children for it; it was someone else's household. In Jiyuan, Henan, he later saw something different: after brothers divided the household, parents who could not care for themselves were supported in rotation, and the quality of care was generally rather high; in the village they surveyed there was not one elderly suicide. His explanation: Jiyuan is a "northern small-lineage type" of village, where villagers care very much how others judge unfilial conduct. (From the originals as reposted on Aisixiang and from surveys; only usable as case studies.)

What I read from the contrast between these two places: in both, children have gone to the city and the old are left behind, but where village gossip and judgment still work, old people do somewhat better; where public opinion has failed, they do worse. This is my reading of putting the two studies side by side, not their conclusion, and it is only two regional cases.

Those "memories." You might ask: how would the memory of mutual guarding show up today? I found no paper that studies this directly. There is circumstantial evidence. Bai and Wu, using county-level data from around the Cultural Revolution, found that counties with higher Cultural Revolution intensity, and the cohorts who went to school during it, have markedly lower trust today; another study using national survey data found that the decline "glues" trust toward relatives and friends but "separates" it from colleagues and people one barely knows; Yuhua Wang found that where Cultural Revolution violence was heavy, people trust national leaders less. (All from abstracts; I did not reach the full texts; authors and data sources should follow the originals.) These studies measure the "level of trust"; none measures "how this memory affects old-age care and favors today," and none tests whether it passes to children. So "the shadow is passed down generations" is for now a conjecture, not an existing conclusion.

A parallel: the compounds of Southeast Asia

In the past two years there has been one matter I kept beside me as I read these materials: the telecom-fraud compounds of Southeast Asia.

First, what can be checked. The UN human rights office's August 2023 report estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and about 100,000 in Cambodia were trapped in compounds, forced to carry out online fraud; Laos, the Philippines and Thailand are destinations or transit points. The report says most of these people are men, most not citizens of the country where they are held, and they suffer torture, arbitrary detention, sexual violence and forced labor; in the high commissioner's words: "They are not criminals." There was a newer report in February 2026; Amnesty International's June 2026 report documented 73 survivors from 16 countries. (From media relays; figures vary.)

Compounds have also been raided. In October 2025 Myanmar's military announced it had captured and closed the KK compound; according to media, after the joint China–Myanmar–Thailand operation began in February 2025, more than 7,600 Chinese suspects were escorted back from Myawaddy. In the same month the US Treasury sanctioned 146 targets linked to the Prince Group, and the US Department of Justice moved to forfeit about 127,000 bitcoin, then worth about 15 billion dollars; in January 2026 Cambodia, at China's request, arrested and extradited the Prince Group's chairman Chen Zhi.

Kidnapping is supported by many survivors' accounts and records of international bodies. Organs? There is such a claim; it is unconfirmed. In 2022 Cambodian police said that, on investigation, "organ trading" was a threat compounds used to frighten staff, with no real harvesting; in 2026 Thai officials took reporters to an operating room in a border compound and said they suspected it had been used, but there was no forensic evidence, no bodies, and no one with organs removed came forward, and Thailand and Cambodia have a territorial dispute, so these claims have their own stance. So on this point I can only write up to here.

The people trapped inside cannot be written off as "bad people." The report's words are meant for us: many are young people deceived by recruitment ads, with passports confiscated, beaten and sold on from hand to hand. Their parents, at home, received a telephone call.

Why does this belong in this piece? I put it under "What I think" below.

Turning it around

First, the strongest objection: perhaps there was no "destruction," only change.

The hundreds of millions who return home for the Spring Festival, ancestor worship at Qingming, the old houses, the local accents, these have not disappeared. That an ancestral hall in a town has been rebuilt shows that people still want it. "The countryside" has not died; it has gone from "the foundation of survival" to "hometown," to sentiment. This may be right. What I think it cannot answer: can sentiment carry an old person's medical care and daily life?

Second, class struggle had a base of "partial truth." Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping themselves point out that the class division was built on a "partly real" social differentiation in the countryside. Land reform gave land to peasants who had none or little; that is true and cannot be wiped out because of what happened afterward. Gratitude was not all taught.

Third, the word "imported" will be met with: denunciation and collective punishment existed in Qin. The "denounce wrongdoers" order of Shang Yang above is native Legalism. Qin Hui has said that traditional China was "Confucian on the surface, Legalist within," talking benevolence outside and, inside, registered households and another layer of control; he also reminds us that "the emperor's power does not go below the county" and "self-rule below the county" are not wholly right, since imperial power reached into villages through the lijia, baojia and clerks; from the Ming, in some places, the court regrouped lineages by lijia and the lineage was left only as a shell. (From commentary; I have not read the originals.) So "traditional rural China was a good place of self-rule" is partly imagined by later people. By this view, what was pulled away was an arrangement of "the state borrowing the lineage," not necessarily "self-rule"; and informing was not invented by Marxism.

Fourth, don't think past people had so little individuality. Yan Yunxiang's book has been questioned by reviewers: is individualized family life really found only in the socialist-period countryside? Traditional society also had illicit passion and unfilial sons; one cannot first assume that the past had no individuals.

Fifth, "no taboos toward outsiders" did not necessarily begin after 1949. In Fei Xiaotong's From the Soil there is a chapter titled "Morality that binds private persons": in the differential mode, morality follows relationships, applied to near people, and for far people and strangers the rules loosen. (I cite only the chapter title and gist; I did not check the wording.) If so, looseness toward strangers was already in rural society; the change after 1949 may be that even the "near" circle was taken apart.

Sixth, the people in the compounds come from many countries, and those in charge are not from one place alone. The UN report says most of those forced to work are not citizens of the host country; Chen Zhi, according to Cambodia's Ministry of the Interior, at one point held Cambodian nationality. On the other hand, the 7,600-odd Chinese suspects escorted home show that mainland Chinese are not few inside, and among them some commit crimes while others were deceived and detained. So for a generalization like "no taboos at all," I have written only "a considerable number of people."

Seventh, repression leaving low trust need not be only Marxism. Xue and Koyama studied the Qing literary inquisitions of 1660 to 1788 and found that in areas that had been hit, local charities such as benevolent halls were about 38% fewer, and people there trust strangers less today. (A working paper; I did not find a journal version.) So the aftereffect of repression is a more general mechanism, not found only after 1949. This does not overturn my judgment, but it reminds me: Marxism used this mechanism most thoroughly and on the widest scale, and I cannot prove that "most" with figures.

I accept all seven. Having accepted them, I still feel that some things are not imagined.

What I think

I believe that rural China was thoroughly destroyed by the imported creed of Marxism (Majiao), hearts included.

First, one thing made clear: I do not object to people moving out. "A transplanted tree dies, a transplanted person lives," "follow the water and grass"; people should be able to move, and should not be tied for life to their native place. After 1980 most of those who left were heading toward better days. That is not what I mean by "destroyed." What I mean by destroyed is another thing.

The spark was class struggle. In 1927 Mao Zedong in Hunan wrote "we must overthrow all gentry power," "every village must create a brief reign of terror." What he wanted to overthrow then was the middle layer of rural society that stood between the state and the peasants. In 1950 the class labels and the speaking of bitterness stopped recognizing people in a village by "whose family, whose elder," and recognized them by "what class status." In 1962 it was made the key link again, and kept going for sixteen years. My view is that this method worked because it seized the easiest few things in human nature: fear, envy, the wish to turn the tables. Once those are put to use, lineage heads and gentry do not need to come out and speak; everyone is willing to watch everyone else. This is my judgment; the historical record cannot prove it; it is only what I thought after reading these materials.

My late father said a line: above there is one big Mao Zedong, below are all little Mao Zedongs, the size of a wine cup, the size of a finger. I heard it for many years and only now understand: power is not only at the very top; it copies itself down layer by layer, and each layer has a small version, holding a little piece that decides whether life is easy or hard for you. In such a structure people guard against one another, because you do not know which one beside you is the small version that has you in hand. (My understanding of my father's line in this paragraph is mine, not his words.)

That is why I say what was destroyed was not only ancestral halls, lineage land and gentry, but also the little trust between person and person.

Looking at the timeline again, four things were pulled away. One is the channel, the road connecting high and low, cut in 1905, and that cut does not belong to Marxism. One is the net underneath, the common property and common houses of lineage land, charity estates and ancestral halls, taken away after 1950; some were set up again, thirty years later. One is the transmission of rules, the places that teach rules to the next generation, from the school to the ancestral hall to the last old person in the family. And one is trust. The first three can be repaired, at the cost of money, space and time; the fourth I think is hardest to repair, because it is not a building, it is one person's assurance toward another.

The compounds of Southeast Asia, I think, can also be seen along this line. My view is: decades of destruction, plus indoctrinating education, made a considerable number of people lose their sensitivity to "this must not be done," unable to hold a bottom line or to care about human ties. What governed people in the countryside, the eyes of acquaintances, ancestors, gods and Buddhas, the two words "losing face," was taken away one by one, and what went in was "if the goal is right, means do not matter," and "guard against others." A person who steps outside the circle of acquaintances to a place where nobody knows him has nothing to stop him. The deceived and detained in the compounds are the other end of this: they were not taught how to guard themselves, and they have no net to return to. This is my judgment, not a research conclusion.

So about going back to the countryside in old age, my view is: don't ask whether the old home is good; ask how many of these four remain. Missing one, "longing" easily turns into "nobody looking after you."

Among the four there is one road I think can be walked: the ancestral hall. In "The Confucian Predicament Today" I said that Confucianism has been "cut off from supply," and what it is supplied with is "vessels," and I thought of the ancestral hall. It is a ready-made thing: it has a building, a surname, days of ancestor sacrifice, and in the past it also ran schools, managed common property and mediated disputes. Whether it must come back to the village I do not insist. If people leave, it can also be in the city, abroad, anywhere that can join up "where we came from" and "where we are going." In "How Many People Remain in the Countryside" I wrote: this set of things has to be something that can be carried along.

In a society taught to guard against one another, where does trust start again?

References

Ratings: 🟢 original text or official figures read; 🟡 second-hand relay (search summaries, reviews, surveys), originals not read.

  • Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927 original, Collected Works of Mao Zedong edition at the Chinese Marxists Internet Archive (it differs from the Selected Works edition) 🟢: https://www.marxists.org/chinese/maozedong/collect/01-038.htm
  • Land Reform Law of the People's Republic of China (1950), Articles 1 and 3 (Wikisource) 🟢
  • National Bureau of Statistics, share of rural population; migrant worker monitoring reports (see "How Many People Remain in the Countryside") 🟢
  • Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil, Shanghai Guanchashe, 1948; composition and concepts per scholarly surveys 🟡
  • Edict of the fourth day of the eighth month, Guangxu 31 (2 September 1905) abolishing the examinations; the reactions of Yan Fu and Liu Dapeng, relayed from articles such as Wang Xuetai's 🟡
  • Luo Zhitian, "The Social Consequences of the Abolition of the Examination System in the Countryside" and "The Abolition of the Examination System and the Dissolution of the Four-Occupation Society," in The Shift of Power, Beijing Normal University Press, 2014 🟡
  • Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Chinese translation, Jiangsu People's Publishing House) 🟡
  • Government Administration Council, Decision on Defining Class Status in the Countryside, August 1950 (full text not read) 🟡
  • Guo Yuhua and Sun Liping, "Speaking Bitterness: A Mediating Mechanism in the Formation of Peasants' Idea of the State," History and Society, 2002 🟡
  • Communiqué of the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, 1962; Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, 1978 (communiqué texts not read, per surveys) 🟡
  • Records of the Grand Historian, "Biography of Lord Shang," the "denounce wrongdoers" order; Book of Han, Annals of Emperor Xuan, edict of the fourth year of Dijie; Tang Code with Commentary, General Principles, "those who live together may conceal for one another," per scholarly surveys, originals not checked 🟡
  • 2012 revision of the Criminal Procedure Law, Article 188 (now Article 193), and commentary by Chen Bisheng and other scholars 🟡
  • Resolution on Establishing People's Communes in the Countryside (1958); the 1983–85 figures on separating government and commune, per surveys 🟡
  • Yan Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999, Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House (Chinese edition), 2006; from reviews and interviews 🟡
  • Wu Chongqing, "From 'Acquaintance Society' to 'Acquaintance Society Without a Subject,'" Dushu, 2011, per surveys 🟡
  • Qin Hui, Ten Essays on Tradition and "The Imperial Will Under the Shell of the Lineage," per commentary 🟡
  • UN human rights office, August 2023 report (at least 120,000 in Myanmar, about 100,000 in Cambodia) and February 2026 update, per news relays 🟡: https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/1763/hundreds-of-thousands-trafficked-into-online-criminality-in-southeast-asia-ohchr
  • Amnesty International, June 2026 report on Cambodian compounds (73 survivors, 16 countries), per media 🟡: https://interaksyon.philstar.com/politics-issues/2026/06/09/314680/amnesty-says-cambodia-scam-centers-still-operating-despite-crackdowns/
  • The KK compound, Myawaddy repatriations (7,600-plus, figures vary), Prince Group sanctions and Chen Zhi's extradition, per Tencent News, Wikipedia and others 🟡: https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20261007A05GYV00
  • Thai officials' suspicion about an "operating room" at the O'Smach compound (unconfirmed) 🔴: https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40070780; Cambodian police's 2022 statement, per media 🟡
  • Ministry of Civil Affairs press conference, 2022 (empty-nest elderly more than half, over 70% in some areas), per media 🟡; National Rural Fixed Observation Points, 2019 (cited in literature) 🟡; Seventh National Population Census (rural population aged 60 and over: 23.81%) 🟢
  • Yan Yunxiang, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village, Stanford UP, 1996; from reviews and interviews 🟡
  • Xi Chen, "Gift-giving and Network Structure in Rural China: Utilizing Long-Term Spontaneous Gift Records," PLoS ONE, 2014 (IZA DP 8642) 🟡: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128647/
  • Fanghua Li & Yuan Tian, "Social Network, Gift Exchanging and Inequality in China," SIOE 2016 conference paper (abstract only) 🟡
  • Liu Yanwu, "Suicide among the Rural Elderly and Crisis Intervention (1980–2009)," Research on Peasant Suicide; He Xuefeng, "Nowhere to Turn in Old Age in China: A Survey of Elderly Suicide in the Countryside," "Why Do Rural Elderly Choose Suicide" (both based on surveys in Jingshan, Hubei and Jiyuan, Henan; from Aisixiang reposts and surveys) 🟡
  • Liang Bai & Lingwei Wu, "Political movement and trust formation: Evidence from the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)," European Economic Review 122, 2020 🟡 (abstract only): https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eecrev/v122y2020ics0014292119301916.html
  • Yuhua Wang, "The Political Legacy of Violence During China's Cultural Revolution," British Journal of Political Science 🟡 (abstract only)
  • Melanie Meng Xue & Mark Koyama, "Autocratic Rule and Social Capital: Evidence from Imperial China," working paper (NBER, MPRA versions) 🟡: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84249/
  • Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, surveys such as "The State of Villages in Depopulated Areas" (2006: 7,873 villages, 12.6%); Ono Akira's "marginal villages," from Japanese abstracts 🟡: https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000029292.pdf