In the past, the shaping of our peasant image formed two habitual modes: one is to tell positively how the protagonist turns an enemy into a friend by means of humiliation, self-sacrifice or good character in the binary opposition between reform and conservatism or between advanced and backward, winning the trust of the villagers and making progress in the reform; the other is to resolve the contradiction through a series of skit or comic stories of the protagonist and maintain its attraction to the audience. The aesthetic consequence of these two habitual models is that the image of farmers has become an almost immutable symbol, lacking in richness and attractiveness and there is a huge gap between peasant image and real life. This model is a flattening of reality itself.
The most likely content of this passage is the shortcomings of a single description of the image of farmers.