In the eyes of those living in cities, country people are "stupid" (yu). Even those people who advocate rural work regard stupidity, sickness, and poverty as symptoms of everything that is wrong in Chinese rural villages. 1 We can, of course, objectively measure sickness and poverty, but on what grounds can we say that country people are "stupid"? When peasants, walking in the middle of a road, hear a car honking behind them, they become so nervous that they simply do not know which way to jump. Then the drivers of those cars slam on the brakes, stick their heads out of the window, spit and curse, and call those peasants "stupid"! If that is stupidity, then country people have been wronged.

Once I took my students on a field trip to the countryside. After inspecting corn growing in one of the fields, a young female student, acting as if she knew it all, announced, "This year's wheat has grown extremely tall." The peasant standing beside her did not spit at her even once, but gave her a little smile, which an astute observer might have interpreted as a reaction to her stupidity. Country people do not know how to deal with traffic because they have never experienced how to live in a city. That is a question of knowledge, not of intelligence. In the same way, when city people visit the countryside, they do not even know something as simple as how to chase the dogs away; but we should not call them "idiots" just because they are frightened by barking dogs. By equal measure, we certainly have no reason to call country people "stupid"because they lack knowledge about such simple rules of the road as whether to walk on the left or on the right side. Stupidity has no bearing here.

When our well-meaning social workers say that country people are stupid, they usually mean that country people cannot read. They are illiterate, or what we call "character blind." Their eyes cannot even recognize one Chinese character. That they are illiterate is a fact. I would never oppose a movement to bring literacy to the countryside. However, it would be hard to convince me that illiteracy equals stupidity. "Stupidity"indicates a lack of, or a defect in, intelligence. The ability to read is not a measure of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn. If people have had no opportunity to study, they will necessarily know very little, regardless of whether or not they possess the ability to learn. Therefore, do we mean to say that country people are not only illiterate but also incapable of learning?

During the war, when my colleagues and I were evacuated to a distant rural area, some of our children attended a rural elementary school. In whatever classes they attended, our children learned faster and had better grades than the country children. In front of all the parents, the teachers always praised our children as being bright and spirited, by which they meant that the children of professors naturally possess high intelligence. I was, of course, delighted with such compliments for my own child. For us poor professors, who had been deprived of nearly everything, it seemed nice that we could still bequeath to our children a natural ability that left others far behind. One day, however, I saw students catching grasshoppers in the field after school. Those "bright and spirited" children of ours chased those grasshoppers all over the place, but they failed to catch anything. At the same time, being very agile, the peasant children caught grasshoppers with every grab. On my way home, I felt my pride deflate.

That peasant children could not learn characters in the classroom faster than the professors' children is just like the fact that professors' children could not catch more grasshoppers than the peasant children. I did not blame my child for being unable to catch grasshoppers. First, our family did not need grasshoppers to supplement our food. In those rural areas of Yunnan, people like to add grasshoppers to their dishes; their taste is somewhat like the dried shrimps from Suzhou. Second, my child never had the opportunity to practice catching grasshoppers. Professors' children always wore socks and shoes. To keep their dignity, they had to walk very carefully, and if they got dirty, their parents would scold them. Therefore, even when they went after the grasshoppers, they would always have misgivings about it, and so would never be quite agile enough to catch them. These are probably the immediate reasons, but an even more basic reason is that they never ran wild in the fields every day; they never learned to distinguish a blade of grass from an insect. As a result of protective coloration, grasshoppers are always the same color as the grass, so it takes trained eyes to see them.

Can this reasoning that I just applied to my own child also be applied to rural children to explain their "stupidity" in learning characters? I think it fits perfectly. Unlike professors' children, those children from the countryside did not grow up seeing books and characters everywhere. That was not their daily fare. Professors' children did not inherit some special ability to learn characters well, but they obviously grew up in an environment that made learning characters easier. Therefore, seen in this fashion, the question about whether country people are the equals of city people in intelligence cannot be resolved.

When those social workers say that country people are stupid, they probably mean that their knowledge, and not their intelligence, is inferior. However, even this point seems implausible. At most, we can say that country people do not match city dwellers in their knowledge about what is required for city living. That much is correct. But can we not also say that there are many illiterate people in the countryside because life there does not require literacy? Now we arrive at a key point: What is the use of a written language?

In the last chapter, I showed that one of the characteristics of rural society is that people grow up among close acquaintances. In other words, people who work together see each other every single day. In sociology, we call this kind of group a "face-to-face" (mianduimian) group. Gui Youguang says in his book Xiangjixuan ji that, when he meets the same people every day, after a while he is able to tell who is coming by the sound of that person's footsteps. 2 In face-to-face groups, people can identify a visitor without actually seeing him. Although we have lived in modern cities for some time now, we have not completely given up those habits that are so prominent in rural society. Give this a try. The next time someone knocks on your door, just say, "Who is it?" I bet that the person behind the door will simply answer, in a loud voice, "Me!" You recognize the person by the voice. People who live in face-to-face groups do not need to say names. Would a wife say her name to answer her husband's question "Who is it?" We have become so accustomed to giving this "me"answer that sometimes we even do it when the person behind the door cannot recognize our voice. Once, when I returned to my hometown after a long absence, I remember answering a phone call. I had no way to identify the person on the other end of the line, who would only say, when I asked who was speaking, "It's me." I ended up making a blunder.

We ask for the name because we do not know the person. But this is not the way among people who are familiar with each other. Footsteps, voices, even smells are enough for identification. Even in our own social circles, we often omit names when we address one another. This shows that we, too, live among familiar people, and thus we duplicate, in some small degree, a rural society.

Before written languages came into existence, people tied knots in ropes to record things. They did so in order to overcome the difficulty in communicating across time and space. Only when we cannot talk face to face do we need something to replace the spoken word. In Guangxi province, in the mountains where the Yao minority lives, tribal groups notify each other about emergencies by sending runners who carry special coins. Upon receiving the coins, the other tribes will come to the rescue immediately. The coin here is a "character," a sign representing certain meanings upon which both parties previously agreed. If talking face to face is possible, however, such a sign not only would be unnecessary but also could cause misunderstandings. Before the last decade, young lovers were prohibited from seeing each other. 3 In order to communicate, they exchanged love letters. Many tragedies were caused by misunderstandings in those love letters. People who have experienced such misunderstandings know all too well the limits of written language.

Written language cannot fully express one's meaning or emotion, because those meanings and emotions are always grounded in time and space; they fit a context. When one reads the written word, however, one is in a different time and probably in a different place; it is very unlikely that the meanings and emotions, so carefully recorded in written language, can be fully understood in that new context. As a tool for expressing oneself, written language has this irreparable flaw. Therefore, when we use written language, we must pay close attention to grammar, style, and syntax, because they help to lessen the misrepresentations inherent in written language.

When talking, we do not need to pay such close attention to grammar. I am not saying that there is no grammar in conversations but, rather, that when we talk, we also use many additional gestures to clarify what we say. We may point at ourselves while omitting the word "I," but we cannot do this when we write. Instead, we have to try our best to write grammatically correct sentences, because incorrect sentences may cause unfortunate misunderstandings. By contrast, when we use complete, grammatically correct sentences in speech, we sound funny and pedantic. This is the sort of painfully correct speech that one hears from people who learned a foreign language only from books.

Written language is indirect talk. It is an imperfect tool—so much so that telephones and broadcasting are already beginning to displace letters and other forms of writing. What will happen to the written word in the future, after still more developments in communication technology?

If we follow this line of reasoning, then, illiteracy cannot be equated with stupidity. Face-to-face communication is direct contact. Why should people in rural society abandon what is in that context a superior form of communication for one that does not serve as well?

Now I want to take the argument one step further. 4 In face-to-face groups, even spoken language is a tool, for which there is no alternative. Language is a symbolic system based on sounds. A symbol is a thing or an action to which meaning is attached. I say "attached" because"meaning" is not essential to the nature of the thing or the action but, rather, is something added through an association of ideas. A symbol is a social product that arises within the process of social interaction and that people use only as a way to convey meaning to others. Moreover, a symbol only functions as a symbol when other people recognize the meaning that was originally intended. A "meaningful" action, then, will result in the same response from most people. Thus, we can never have a strictly individual language, only social languages. To have the same meaning for the same symbol, people must have had the same experience; they must have been exposed to the same symbol in a similar environment, so that the same meaning can be attached to that symbol. This is the reason that every living group has its own special language, which contains many untranslatable words and sentences.

Language can occur only in the context of a group's common experience. In large groups, people's experiences are complex and often disconnected. They have fewer common experiences on which to base their language. Therefore, the larger the group, the more generalizable and simple the common language becomes—as can be clearly seen in the history of languages.

Besides a common language that the group as a whole shares, there will also be, within the same group, many specialized vocabularies used by various subgroups to articulate their special requirements. Such"working languages" are filled with jargon and idioms. People in the same profession typically have a language of the trade. Other people cannot understand the conversations, because they have not shared the same working experience. In every school and even every dormitory room, specialized vocabularies develop. The most widely occurring "working language" is that which develops between mothers and their children.

Such working languages are only one aspect of the system of symbols used by tightly knit groups. This is the part that is based on sound and that can be verbalized. In such groups, however, many nonverbal symbols can also be used. Facial expressions and gestures are sometimes more expressive than sound in face-to-face settings. Even when a verbal language is used, it is always used in the context of other symbols. I might say to an acquaintance, "That's the way it is." At the same time, I would frown, tighten my lips, rub my temples, and lower my head. The person would understand that the phrase means "It can't be helped" and would sense my disappointment. If the same phrase is used with a different expression, its meaning is entirely different.

Working languages are usually very effective, because they loosen the fixed meanings of words. Language is society's sifter. Those feelings and meanings that differ in size and shape from the holes in the sifter cannot pass through the sifter. I am sure that everyone must have experienced a time when "silence really is better than words." It is in fact true that, although this social sifter helps people understand each other, it also formalizes their meanings and their emotions. In this way, language distorts actual meanings and emotions the very moment they are articulated through words. We always trim the toes to fit the shoes. Language constrains what can be felt and expressed, and sensitive people often resent that.

In face-to-face groups, we speak less. We convey our intentions with our eyes, our emotions with a gesture. We abandon indirect symbols to seek more direct understandings. That is why written language is superfluous in rural society, and even spoken language is not the only way to communicate symbolically.

I absolutely do not mean to suggest that we need not promote literacy in the countryside. With the process of modernization, rural society is already being changed, and literacy is the tool of that change. The point I want to make here is that illiteracy in the countryside results not from people's stupidity but, rather, from the nature of rural society itself. I would like to go even further to say that one should not judge the degree of understanding between people in a society only from the perspective of their written and spoken languages. This is not enough. Written and spoken languages are tools for expression, but they are not the only tools. Moreover, the tools themselves have flaws and limit what can be conveyed. Those advocates of rural literacy should first consider the social foundation of both written and spoken languages. Otherwise, just opening a few rural schools and teaching rural people a few characters will not create "intelligence," as the advocates define it. 7K27WJDE6tlRLumBPkUQxYVdHeS1e3y5gTC7AM0vAy6Km18ISIQ6OUflWlbSQeST