Xie Meijie's Co-authored Paper Published in Social Sciences in China

Recently, a paper titled "Toward a Cultural Organization: The Transformation of Rural Lineages in Contemporary China", co-authored by Xie Meijie, a faculty member of JUFE's Institute of Public Finance and Social Governance, and Professor Dong Leiming of Beijing Normal University, was published in the 7th issue of 2026 of Social Sciences in China.

The article argues that in the course of Chinese-style modernization, although the organizational form of lineages has gradually become increasingly loose, their cultural influence still persists in the daily lives of farmers. Based on the perspective of farmers' everyday life, the article examines lineage transformation across three dimensions — lived practice, common property, and lineage ideology — and finds that lineages are shifting from the perpetuating corporate organizations of traditional society toward cultural organizations. They no longer regulate members' lives through institutional norms, but instead embody the concern concern for bloodline inheritance and family continuity through cultural symbols. While this transformation sustains cultural vitality, it also brings governance challenges, which require stronger guidance to promote the joint shaping of farmers' world of meaning by fine traditional Chinese culture and the core socialist values.

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Social Sciences in China was founded in 1980 and is supervised and sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It is the highest-level comprehensive academic journal in the field of philosophy and social sciences in China.