Abstract:“Private settlement” is a settlement mechanism of the civil dispute based on the rational choice from “the ritual” and “the reasonableness”. This paper, taking the old man Yan’s death for example, discusses the localism of “settle privately”under the background of social transformation. People choose “settle privately” because it can tell right from wrong, so as to promote the settlement of a dispute, but more importantly, because through choosing “settle privately”, people can get support in “the ritual” and “the reasonableness”, which is the basic condition for people to live in rural society, that is the localism of“settle privately”.Localism of “settle privately” tells us that when we settle a dispute, we should not only depend on the current situation to promote the reasonable settlement of dispute, but also aim to the future, and take on the settlement of the dispute as an opportunity to reconstruct the relationship between the parties involved and as astarting point to restart the social order.