The key to building up China’s independent knowledge system in social work lies in how historical experience can be distilled into transmissable practical knowledge. Photo: TUCHONG

The construction of practical knowledge is a crucial part in building up China’s independent knowledge system in Chinese social work. Practical knowledge in social work refers to the “knowledge of doing” that practitioners accumulate and generate through action in specific contexts, and is marked by both historicity and subjectivity. In practice, however, Western professional theoretical discourse has long occupied a dominant position, while the historical experience and embodied wisdom of local practitioners have remained on the margins of knowledge production, sometimes even being labeled “unprofessional.” At the same time, practitioners’ reflections on local experience are often limited to refining technical skills, with too little attention paid to historical depth and practical subjectivity. When the practical experience accumulated by older generations of practitioners is overshadowed by the discourse of modern professional social work, Chinese social work loses the opportunity to engage in dialogue with indigenous historical experience. This, in turn, makes it difficult to develop practical knowledge genuinely rooted in China’s own historical context. For this reason, the construction of indigenous practical knowledge in Chinese social work should integrate the experiences of historical practitioners with the historical experience of contemporary practitioners, while closely examining the historical context and practical details embedded in those experiences, so that local experience can be transformed into indigenous knowledge.

Emphasizing historicity and subjectivity

The theoretical aim of constructing indigenous practical knowledge in Chinese social work is to build, on the dual foundations of historicity and subjectivity, a knowledge system that embodies local practical wisdom by integrating the experiential trajectories of historical and contemporary practitioners. Accordingly, this undertaking should adhere to three theoretical orientations.

First, historical depth and subject formation should be pursued. This orientation encompasses not only the embodied wisdom accumulated by earlier generations of community-level governance practitioners through practices such as mass mobilization and conflict mediation, but also the historical memory reconstructed by contemporary practitioners through reflective engagement with field-based historical records, including village chronicles, local histories, and work notes.

Second, methodological innovation should be pursued. This orientation calls for oral history methods that can bring historical practitioners’ experiential memories back into view, together with action research by contemporary practitioners, so that different forms of experience can enter into cross-temporal dialogue.

Third, the localization of knowledge production should be pursued. This orientation seeks to move beyond the limits of Western instrumental rationality by transforming historical resources—such as collective memory and village experience—into practical wisdom capable of explaining the complexity of Chinese social contexts.

Only by following these three theoretical orientations can social workers become action researchers equipped with both historical consciousness and practical competence, and only in this way can practical knowledge be developed that responds to the needs of community-level social governance in China while highlighting the distinctive professional characteristics of indigenous social work. This, in turn, requires the construction of indigenous practical knowledge in Chinese social work to take historical experience as its point of departure and adopt an integrated pathway of “historical texture–practical details–local transformation.”

Passing on fine tradition

The historical experience of earlier generations of community-level governance practitioners deserves close attention, not least because it can help reconnect knowledge traditions that have become fractured over time. The concepts of social practice and the practitioner give concrete expression to the practical character of Marxism’s localization in China. That character is reflected not only in the generations who devoted themselves to national construction after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, but also, more directly, in the everyday practices of earlier community-level governance practitioners. Their accumulated experience forms an important historical resource for the development of social work with distinct Chinese characteristics, and contains forms of indigenous practical knowledge that cannot be fully captured by existing theoretical frameworks. Although the systematic introduction of Western social work discourse has, to some extent, contributed significantly to the development of the field in China, indigenous historical practical knowledge has yet to be sufficiently integrated with imported theoretical systems. Historical experience therefore needs to be organized more systematically, so that traditional community-level governance experience can be transformed into indigenous practical knowledge for modern Chinese social work.

A closer examination of historical practitioners and their experiences shows that earlier generations of community-level governance practitioners had already internalized practical wisdom as embodied practical knowledge. Yet in the course of modernization, the field at times fell into the tendency to mechanically copy Western social work theories, and failed to fully recognize the social work traditions and indigenous knowledge embedded in the historical practices of community-level governance. This dominance of professional theoretical discourse over local practical knowledge created a rupture between indigenous historical experience and contemporary practice. Regrettably, much of the historically grounded Chinese experience in community work and mass work embodied by older community-level practitioners is gradually disappearing with the passage of time. How to systematically document, revitalize, and make use of the valuable experiences of these earlier community-level governance practitioners has therefore become a primary task in constructing practical knowledge for social work in the new era.

More specifically, oral history methods can be employed to collect and preserve the experiential memories of elder community-level governance practitioners in order to explore the concrete forms of knowledge embedded in areas such as mass mobilization, conflict mediation, community organization, mutual aid and cooperation, women’s participation, and community services. Their work notes and meeting records can also be gathered and analyzed, allowing practical experience to be distilled from these records and historical knowledge to be transformed for contemporary use. Such dialogue across two or three generations can not only breathe new life into the historical experience of community-level governance, but also open new pathways for producing indigenous social work knowledge in the new era.

It should be emphasized that recovering experience in this way is by no means a simple revisiting of history, but rather a creative transformation of historical experience. Grounded in the historical practices of indigenous community-level governance, experience generated at the community level should be summarized and transformed into policies and programs that can guide and advance practice in the new era. This is not only a continuation of historical experience, but also a necessary condition for contemporary social work practical knowledge to develop a stronger sense of history and deeper indigenous grounding. Attention should also be paid to the reflexive organization of historical practical experience in order to create practical knowledge imbued with subjectivity. Under the guidance of Society Work Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the localization of social work practice in China has accelerated. This accelerating localization makes it all the more important to cultivate social workers rooted in their own historical traditions—practitioners who can draw lessons from historical practice and carry forward the practical wisdom earlier generations accumulated in response to social change. Such cultivation can help contemporary professional practice develop a stronger historical consciousness. This requires young social workers to acquire the methods necessary to uncover historical materials and experiences related to elders within their own practice settings, explore the emotional connections between their personal growth histories and the experiences of two or three generations within the community, and establish a historical dialogue between professional practice and collective memory.

Only through such efforts can social workers develop a deeper understanding of, and reflection on, the lived experiences of communities during the collectivist era, historical traditions of mutual aid, and the historical work practices embedded in villages. This work lays a solid foundation for the production of practical knowledge, enabling practitioners to understand communities and populations from the perspective of local history and adopt corresponding strategies in their professional practice—fully demonstrating locality and practical prowess. For social workers, this kind of historical perspective on social practice is crucial to connecting individual experience with the historical transformations of communities.

Abstracting transmissible experience

In sum, the construction of indigenous practical knowledge in Chinese social work must be rooted in the subjectivity of practitioners and the historical contexts in which they are situated. When social workers employ a practice-reflective epistemology to trace the historical texture linking earlier practitioners, diverse urban and rural populations, and themselves, indigenous practical knowledge in social work will inevitably achieve creative transformation and innovative development. This also indicates that the key to building up China’s independent knowledge system in social work lies precisely in how historical experience can be distilled into practical knowledge that is both abstract and transmissible.

Wang Haiyang is a professor from the School of Law and Social Work at Dongguan University of Technology.