Research on the Countermeasures of Wenzhou Rural Community Governance Based on Vernacular Cultural Identity--An Empirical Analysis of NC Community in Wenzhou City as an Example

NC community is a typical rural community located in the eastern part of the main city of Wenzhou, which is formed by six administrative villages, including N village, through the reform of village-level organization settings, with a community area of 13.19 square kilometers and a resident population of 33,015 people (including 7,407 people in N village and 3,939 people in B village.) Since 2016, it has been awarded the national community work service demonstration community, the national national national unity and progress in the creation of a demonstration community and become the only one of the first national rural happy community construction demonstration unit in Wenzhou City. It is the first “calligraphy village” in Zhejiang Province, a well-known “people” village (the whole village has more than 100 surnames), and has a national intangible cultural heritage “Tanghe Belief Culture”, a provincial intangible cultural heritage “Spelling Dragon Lantern” and a provincial cultural relics protection unit “Tanghe Temple”, “July 15 Ning Village Buddha” and other folk activities have far-reaching influence in its district. The administrative village, Village B, consists of two natural villages, Qiuzhai and Wangzhai. The villagers of this village are mainly engaged in agricultural production, beach work, etc., and there are few records about the history and culture of the village, traditional skills and folk activities. In terms of vernacular cultural heritage, Village N has preserved a more complete and rich form of traditional culture.

For a long time, scholars at home and abroad have had different definitions of the concept of rural community. In The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community, published in 1915, Gelpin, a professor of sociology in Wisconsin, United States of America, argued that “a rural community is a synthesis of a trading center and its surrounding dispersed farm families”. Some scholars emphasize the space for economic activity in the countryside, considering rural communities to be “regional societies in which peasants engage in agricultural production as their main means of livelihood”. Other scholars have argued that rural communities are in fact “rural communities” established by individual villages. Mr. Fei Xiaotong once revealed the substantive characteristics of rural communities, such as the “society of acquaintances” and “small families”, by referring to “the pattern of differential order, the order of propriety, and the politics of inaction”.

As we can see from the above studies, scholars’ definition of “rural community” has “broken through the traditional natural villages and administrative areas” in terms of geography and scope. However, in addition to this, the constituent elements such as “engagement in basic economic activities such as agricultural production, close blood and kinship ties, and generally similar lifestyles and values” are still traditionally “vernacular” in nature. Based on the above characteristics, this paper takes the NC community in Longwan District, Wenzhou City as the research object, and selects two representative administrative villages under its jurisdiction to conduct an empirical research on the status quo of vernacular cultural identity and rural community governance on the basis of a preliminary understanding of its development overview. During the research process, a questionnaire was designed using the convenience sampling method, with Village N and Village B as the samples, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the correlation and influencing factors of the status of vernacular cultural identity, the rural social order and the villagers’ sense of psychological security, and to reflect on the impact and influence of the vernacular cultural identity on the governance of the rural community. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed (100 from village N, 100 from village B), 200 were collected (100 from village N, 100 from village B), with a recovery rate of 100%, and 180 were valid (100 from village N, 80 from village B), with an effective rate of 90%. The valid questionnaires after organizing and reviewing were entered into the software through data entry, and the data were statistically processed using SPSS, a statistical package for social sciences. Descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test and correlation analysis were selected according to the type of data. The significance level was taken as α=0.05 (two-sided test). The basic situation of the two villages is shown in Table 1, where *** indicates P<0.01.

1)

Theory of multiple linear regression model

The number of explanatory variables (independent variables) in the univariate linear regression model is one. In the actual application of the problem, the number of independent variables will be more than one, such as in this paper, the impact on the effectiveness of rural community governance is not only affected by the influence of the vernacular cultural identity, but also by the internal and external environment related constraints. And when the number of independent variables reaches more than two, it is called multiple linear regression model [25].

The general form of multiple linear regression model: (1) yi=α0+α1x1i+α2x2i+⋯+αkxki+εii=1,2,⋯,n

In the model yi is referred to as the dependent variable while x1i,x2i,⋯,xki is referred to as the independent variable. At k=1 , equation (1) is a univariate linear regression model, and at k>2 , equation (1) is called a multiple linear regression model. The dependent variable yi consists of an error term random variable εi and a linear function α0+α1x1i+α2x2i+⋯+αkxki of the k independent variables.

The parameter estimation of the multiple linear regression model is much more complicated than that of the univariate linear regression model, and in order to facilitate the computation and analysis, and to facilitate the generalization of the results from univariate totals to multivariate totals in general, a matrix is introduced as a tool to simplify the computation and analysis.

A set of random samples in the overall set of yi,x1i,x2i,⋯,xki , i=1,2,⋯,n . In then (1) can be written as the following matrix representation: (2) y1=α0+α1x11+α2x21+⋯+αkxk1+ε1y2=α0+α1x12+α2x22+⋯+αkxk2+ε2⋮yn=α0+α1x1n+α2x2n+⋯+αkxkn+εn

Where k is the number of independent variables, α0,α1,⋯,αk is the parameter to be determined and εi is the random variable.

Using matrix operations it is expressed as: (3) y1y2⋮yn=1x11⋯xk11x12⋯xk2⋮⋮⋮1x1n⋯xknα0α1⋮αk+ε1ε2⋮εn

Denote y=y1y2⋮yn , X=1x11⋯xk11x12⋯xk2⋮⋮⋮1x1n⋯xkn , α=α0α1⋮αk , ε=ε1ε2⋮εn .

This can be expressed in terms of a matrix: (4) y=Xα+ε

Noting α^=α^0α^1⋮α^k , e=e1e2⋮en , the matrix representation of the sample is: (5) y=Xα→+e where α^0,α^1,⋯,α^k is the fitted value of α0,α1,⋯,αk respectively, the regression equation is: (6) y^i=α^0+α^1x1i+α^2x2i+⋯+α^kxki where α^0 is a constant and α^1,⋯,α^k is the partial regression coefficient.

The minimum value is obtained, when the sum of squares of deviations is minimum: (8) Qβ^1,β^2,⋯,β^m=∑i=1nyi−β^0+β^1x11+β^2x12+⋯+β^mxim2=minβ^1,β^2,⋯β^m∑i=1nyi−β0+β1x11+β2xi2+⋯+βmxim2

The β^0,β^1,β^2,⋯,β^m obtained in equation (8) is then called the least squares estimate of the regression coefficient β0,β1,β2,⋯,βm . The estimate of the regression coefficient β^0,β^1,β^2,⋯,β^m needs to satisfy the following conditions: (9) ∂Q∂β0β0−β^0=−2∑i=1nyi−β^0+β^1xi1+β^2xi2+⋯+β^mxim=0∂Q∂β1β1−β^1=−2∑i=1nyi−β^0+β^1xn1+β^2xi2+⋯+β^mximxi1=0⋯⋯∂Q∂βmβm−β^m=−2∑i=1nyi−β^0+β^1xi1+β^2xi2+⋯+β^mximxim=0

For X in Eq. (5), if X′X−1 exists, then a least squares estimate of the regression coefficients can be obtained and the least squares estimate is: (10) β^=X′X−1X′y

At this point, the estimates of the regression coefficients are calculated and the resulting multiple linear regression model is: (11) y^=β^0+β^1x1+β^2x2+⋯+β^imxm

Based on the previous theoretical analysis, the explanatory variable chosen in this paper is Rural Community Governance Effectiveness (RCGE), and the explanatory variable is Local Cultural Identity (LCI), and also the three sub-variables of Local Cultural Identity are used as the explanatory variables, i.e., Cognitive Identity (CI), Emotional Identity (EI) and Behavioral Identity (BI). The effectiveness of rural community governance was assigned a value of 1 to 4, representing poor, average, good and very good. Each explanatory variable was quantified using a five-point Likert scale, i.e., 1~5 represents strongly disagree~strongly agree, respectively.

In addition, this paper also chooses Age, Sex, Education, Occupation and Community Life Time as control variables, and the relevant data of each control variable is derived from the survey data in the previous section, which provides support for analyzing the degree of influence of vernacular cultural identity on rural community governance.

Based on the explanatory variables, explanatory variables and control variables selected in the previous paper, combined with the knowledge related to multiple linear regression model, this paper establishes a multiple linear regression model to analyze the specific impact of vernacular cultural identity on the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou.

In order to verify H1, this paper sets up the model as follows: (12) RCGE=β0+β1LCI+β2Age+β3Sex+β4Edu+β5Occ+β6CT+ε

In order to verify H1a~H1c, this paper sets up the model as follows: (13) RCGE=β0+β1CI+β2EI+β3BI+β4∑Control+ε

In the above model, RCGE is the effect of rural community governance in Wenzhou, LCI is the vernacular cultural identity, β0 is the constant term, CI,EI,BI is the cognitive identity, affective identity and behavioral identity, respectively, Control is each control variable, ε is the random disturbance term, and β0~β6 is the regression coefficient of each variable.

The survey on the traditional culture level of the two villages was divided into three dimensions, namely, the degree of understanding, the degree of liking, and the degree of self-evaluation of the inheritance effect. Traditional culture is divided into material culture and spiritual culture, such as “how much you like the material culture of the village” and “how much you like the spiritual culture of the village”. The results of the traditional culture level showed that the consistency reliability of the “three dimensions” was 0.901, 0.885 and 0.877, respectively, and the consistency reliability of the “three dimensions” was higher than that of village B. It is worth noting that the villagers in the two villages generally believe that the factors that have a greater impact on the identity of the local culture are “social environment” and “family influence”. The villagers in Village N attributed the main factor to “social environment” (49%), while the villagers in Village B attributed it to “family influence” (41.3%). However, due to the objectivity and complexity of the social and environmental factors in terms of the number and structure of the group, it is difficult for the villagers to shake it with their subjective will. On the other hand, family factors have a certain degree of subjectivity and singularity, and villagers, as individuals, are often more susceptible to the influence of their family traditions and members’ behaviors in their family life, so they are more likely to make changes. Does this mean that Village B has a greater possibility of improvement in the inheritance and development of traditional culture, thus affecting the degree of villagers’ identification with local culture? This is worthy of further study and discussion.

Based on the questionnaire data given in the previous section, the data on the attitudes held by the villagers of the two villages towards traditional culture, the degree of understanding, the degree of liking, the degree of satisfaction with security governance, participation in the governance of the hospital and the sense of security, happiness and satisfaction with life in the village were obtained through the collation of the two villagers. Table 2 shows the results of the comparison of differences in traditional culture, security governance, sense of security, satisfaction and happiness between villagers of village N and village B. In the table, * indicates P<0.05, ! indicates reaching marginal significance. As can be seen from the table, all the data of Village N are slightly higher than that of Village B. There was a significant difference in “life satisfaction” (t=5.205, p<0.05), and there was a marginal difference in “satisfaction with the security situation in the village” and “sense of security in the village”.

After analyzing the data related to “attitudes toward traditional culture, satisfaction with security governance, willingness to participate in the security governance of the village, sense of security, satisfaction, happiness, knowledge of the traditional culture of the village, liking and knowledge of the cultural traditions of the village” of the villagers of the two villages, it is found that there are significant differences between the villagers of the two villages. In order to further analyze the correlation between the individual embodiments, this paper uses Pearson’s correlation coefficient to conduct correlation analysis, and the results of the correlation analysis are shown in Table 3, where * indicates P<0.01. Among them, A1~A9 represent, respectively, the attitudes held towards the traditional culture of the village, satisfaction with the security situation of the village, the degree of willingness to participate in the security governance of the village, the sense of security in the village, satisfaction with life in the village, the sense of happiness in the village, the degree of understanding of the traditional culture of the village, the degree of liking of the traditional culture of the village, and the degree of inheritance of the traditional culture of the village.

Based on the results of the correlation analysis, it can be seen that the more villagers know and like the traditional culture of their village, and the better they think the traditional cultural heritage of their village is, the higher the willingness of individuals to understand the state of law and order governance of their village, to participate in the security governance of their village, and the higher the sense of security, satisfaction, and happiness they feel when they live in their village. This shows that cultural identity plays a positive role in rural security governance. This tendency is caused by many factors. First, culture itself has a certain “governability”. Culture is “a set of historically specific institutions that form governance relationships with the goal of transforming the minds and behaviors of the population at large”. Therefore, culture can be regarded as an effective resource and means of social governance, and can be utilized and instrumentalized to carry out social governance through its characteristics and functions. Secondly, local culture is the common basis for the identity of peasant subjects. “Culture as a mode of symbolic meaning is presented in individual interactions, which in turn become shared symbols that coordinate individual behavior.” Therefore, the values and consensus presented by the local culture can, to a certain extent, form unanimously recognized rules, thus coordinating the individual behavior of farmers. Thirdly, at present, farmers still have the dilemma of urbanized cultural identity and civic identity, etc. If we can help this group realize their deep-rooted native culture complex and make good use of it, we can alleviate the contradiction of identity to a certain extent, increase the farmers’ sense of security and happiness, and thus promote the harmony and stability of the rural society.

In order to further explore the influence of local cultural identity on the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou, this paper utilizes the multiple linear regression model for analysis. In order to delete the insignificant variables and establish the “optimal” equation, this study, based on the results of the previous analysis, takes the vernacular cultural identity, cognitive identity, emotional identity and behavioral identity as the explanatory variables, and age, gender, education, occupation (and community life time as the control variables) as the step-by-step method for the regression analysis, with an entry criterion of 0.05 and a deletion criterion of 0.10. 0.05, and the deletion criterion was 0.10. During the analysis, this study also did regression tests on the questionnaire data. Table 4 shows the model summary, where a, b, c, d are the estimation results of stepwise addition of explanatory variables, the same below, and SEE is the standardized estimation error.

As can be seen from the table, a total of four models were generated by multiple linear regression, and the goodness-of-fit test value, R-squared, increased with the introduction of new variables, and the explanatory power of the model gradually increased. Among them, model 4 has the best fit, R2 is 0.479, the predictor variables can effectively explain 47.9% of the variance of “the effect of governance in rural communities in Wenzhou”, the explanatory ability is limited, the model relevance is general, but acceptable, passed the goodness-of-fit test. At the same time, the DW value is 1.984, which is approximated as 2, and it can be considered that there is no autocorrelation in the residual series. Tolerance and variance inflation factor are measures to diagnose multicollinearity, and in this model, the tolerance values are all greater than 0.6, and the VIF values are between 1.5 and 2.5, which indicate that the independent variables have no covariance problems with each other, and meet the regression requirements.

In addition, ANOVA was further performed for the four regression models, and the results of the analysis are shown in Table 5, where SOS is the sum of squares, DF is the degrees of freedom, and MS is the mean square. As can be seen from the table, the p-values corresponding to the F-statistics in the four models are all less than the significance level of 0.05, indicating that there is a significant linear relationship between the stepwise-added explanatory variables and the explanatory variables, which has the conditions for the establishment of a linear model.

In order to further understand whether the research data conform to normal distribution, the normal distribution test is conducted for the standardized residual data of the statistical samples. Figure 1 shows the results of the normal distribution test of the statistical samples, in which Figure 1(a)~(b) shows the histogram of the standardized residuals and the normal probability distribution, respectively. As can be seen from the figure, the standardized residuals of the statistical samples are randomly distributed on both sides of the zero point and are all in the interval range of -3 to 3. In addition, in the normal probability plot of the standardized residuals, the scatter plot basically coincides with the straight line with a tilt angle of 45° from the origin, which indicates that the sample observations approximately obey a normal distribution. Therefore, the regression results are reliable after further validation.

Figure 1.

Normal distribution test results

Based on the regression test in the previous section, this paper utilizes the regression model of factors influencing the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou constructed in the previous section to carry out empirical analysis. Table 6 shows the regression results of the model, in which *,**,*** indicate that significance is presented at the 10%, 5% and 1% levels, respectively, and robust errors are shown in parentheses. Model (1) is the regression results with only vernacular cultural identity added, model (2) is the regression results with control variables added, model (3) is the regression results with only cognitive identity, affective identity and behavioral identity added, and model (4) is the regression results with all the variables added.

As can be seen from the table, the regression coefficient of the influence of the explanatory variable Local Cultural Identity (LCI) on Rural Community Governance Effect (RCGE) in Wenzhou in model (1) is 0.427, and the significance water of this variable is less than 0.01, which indicates that this variable will significantly and positively influence the effect of governance in rural communities in Wenzhou. That is, for every 1 percentage point increase in the rural cultural identity of the people in rural communities, the effect of rural community governance in Wenzhou will increase by 0.427 percentage points, and H1 is verified. In model (3) the three dimensions of explanatory variable vernacular cultural identity cognitive identity (CI), emotional identity (EI) and behavioral identity (BI) all have a significant positive effect on the effect of rural community governance in Wenzhou at the 1% level, with the regression coefficients of 0.185, 0.219, and 0.202, respectively, in which emotional identity has a greater impact on the enhancement of the effect of governance in rural communities in Wenzhou. Then H1a, H1b and H1c were verified. From the control variables, the significance levels of age (Age), education (Edu), and current occupational status (Occ) are all less than 0.05. It means that the higher the education level, the higher the frequency and the higher the degree of enthusiasm of participating in Wenzhou’s rural community governance, and that farmers with cadre experience are more aware of and concerned about the village affairs relative to the general farmers, and are willing to echo the village regulations and exert their own influence in Wenzhou’s rural community governance. They are willing to echo the village regulations and exert their own influence in the governance of rural communities in Wenzhou. Age is negatively correlated with the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou, with a regression coefficient of -0.053. This may be due to the fact that the older the rural households live in the countryside for a long period of time, and the traditional habits and concepts of life are difficult to be changed, and they are more concerned about the economic welfare of their own families, and therefore have less motivation to participate in the behavior of rural community governance. In addition, in the process of gradually adding variables, there is a decreasing trend in the impact of vernacular cultural identity on the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou, but the overall decreasing trend is small, indicating that there is also a smaller part of external variables that will have an impact on the effectiveness of rural community governance in Wenzhou, but the impact is negligible compared to the impact of vernacular cultural identity. The regression results of model (1)~(4) are basically stable and slightly improved, indicating that the explanatory variables have a more stable influence on the explained variables.

Socialist core values are the value kernel of national governance. In the face of the current evolving vernacular culture and changes in people’s values, cultivating and practicing socialist core values is crucial to leading people’s ideology and advancing rural community governance, and to this end it needs to be done. First, socialist core values should be integrated into rural social governance, and implemented in community governance and farmers’ daily life practices through the indoctrination role of families, schools and communities, so as to ensure a high degree of consistency between community governance and the spiritual pursuit of the masses. Second, the cohesive function of socialist core values should be brought into play (we will talk about how to bring the cohesive function into play below). Utilizing the value orientation of socialist core values at the social level and the moral requirements at the individual level, it is necessary to gather people from different strata of the countryside, expand social identity in respecting differences, and form a synergy of governance, so as to turn the current community governance into a process in which multiple subjects participate together in a regular process of consultation and communication. Thirdly, excellent traditional cultural resources should be fully explored, protected and utilized. Excellent traditional culture is rooted in the local community, originating from the local culture, and is deeply compatible with the moral essence of socialist core values. Therefore, the promotion of excellent traditional Chinese culture is a modern embodiment of the practice of socialist core values, as well as an intrinsic motivation for building a harmonious and stable order in rural communities. Efforts can be made to strengthen the source of ancient villages and intangible cultural heritage protection, and to give full play to the role of cultural genes and spiritual kernel in maintaining villagers’ relationship, safeguarding rural order, and promoting rural harmony; colorful cultural forms such as opera performances and folk activities can be used to spread the mainstream values of the society and enhance the recognition and emotional resonance of the masses, which can be internalized into the villagers’ daily ethics and morality and form the basis of vernacular It can be used to disseminate the mainstream values of society and promote the harmony of villages.

As the main body of rural cultural construction, farmers are constantly exploring and experimenting with the inheritance and innovation of the original vernacular cultural resources. At the same time, as the main body of governance in the countryside, they also play a role in the process of governance with moral and emotional factors such as folkways, clan beliefs, historical memories and neighborly affection, which influence the goals of governance. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the cultivation of this main body and promote the construction of a lasting rural “good governance” order. On the one hand, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of rural youth cultural talents. Rural young adults should be the main body of local cultural creation. However, the process of urbanization and marketization has caused this group of people to migrate outward regularly, causing some damage to the original living environment and traditional order. At present, local schools should carry out education on local culture to cultivate this group’s knowledge and understanding of their own culture, enhance the binding force and sense of belonging to the local culture, and thus promote the harmony and stability of rural society. In addition, it is necessary to attract young people to return and take root, so as to improve the overall quality of the rural population from the root, and inject new forces into the cultural prosperity and security management of the community, thus promoting the “good governance” of the rural community. On the other hand, it is necessary to strengthen the cultivation of village sage culture. For a long time in the past, the village sages were the core force in the construction and management of traditional villages, and the cultural and moral power they possessed had a special role to play in educating villagers, uniting people’s hearts and minds, promoting the establishment of harmonious relationships, and maintaining the stability of rural communities. Therefore, the village management function of the culture of village sages can be brought into full play by advocating the cultivation of the culture of village sages, excavating and protecting the cultural resources of village sages, building a platform for the return of new village sages, creating a council of village sages, and actively fostering new village sages. At the same time, cultural lecture halls, villagers’ activity centers and other carriers are used to publicize the culture of village sages and create an atmosphere of respecting village sages and learning to be a village sage in rural communities. In addition, to guide the cultivation of new governance subjects to build a perfect rural community governance system. For example, it is necessary to guide folk cultural organizations to participate in and give full play to their roles in disseminating local culture, enriching the spiritual life of farmers, fostering mainstream values, and rallying the hearts of the people, thereby promoting the formation of a pluralistic governance mechanism.

Improving public cultural services in rural areas is a priority for rural cultural governance, and plays a positive role in maintaining equity and justice and ensuring social stability in rural areas. Over the past four decades, in the context of China’s urbanization and industrialization, the large-scale mobility and transfer of the rural workforce has led to the gradual decline of rural public cultural spaces and cultural organizations. Traditional rural folklore activities and neighborhood exchanges, for example, have often been replaced by individual and family-centered cultural activities. This phenomenon has gradually “disintegrated” the cohesion of cultural organizations, and has also affected the inherent order of traditional vernacular social stability. It is recommended that we provide basic conditions for rural cultural governance by improving the construction of rural public cultural infrastructure and increasing the supply of rural public cultural products, so as to promote community harmony and stability while enriching the spiritual life of farmers. In addition, the economic foundation is an important guarantee for rural revitalization and a prerequisite for rural social stability and security. The natural and humanistic landscapes, folkways and customs of native cultures can be effectively integrated with rural industries to promote the industrialization of native cultures, drive rural economic development, improve the living conditions of farmers, and ensure that farmers can live and work in peace and contentment in order to promote the stability of rural societies and further enhance the effectiveness of community governance.