(e) how the public health cooperative and birth-
control programme both influence and are influenced by changing village attitudes towards disease, life-expectancy and children.
Moreover, as we became better aware of the details of village life, and as we became better acquainted vicariously with the various households and individuals who make up the village and discovered the multiple ties of kinship, political organization and interests which bound them to each other, new questions began to arise in our minds concerning the interrelations between different aspects of the village's socio-economic structure. These questions about which we are beginning to formulate explanatory hypotheses which go beyond mere description include the following:
13.
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(a) the relationship between kinship ties and the
village's political system, and the relationship between the increasing breakdown in these kinship ties and the erection of an agrarian structure more conducive to economic change:
(b) the relationship between the 'redness' of the
village and its social composition at the time of the Liberation, and the corresponding relationship between this political 'redness' of the village and its openness to change;
(c) the degree to which a conjunction of particular
elements in the village's social, economic and political infrastructure were requisite before the village was able, circa 1966, to 'take off' successfully in its economic development.
Practical value of the study:
There
(a) It is highly unlikely that China would take heed of our project or of any advice we could offer. (b) But a comprehensive view of this Chinese village's affairs would, we believe, be of value outside China, in other late-developing countries. There is, today, much discussion in some of these Third World countries and amongst academic specialists about the need to "learn from China's experience". In the medical field, especially, the impact of the Chinese example has already been great. is a danger, though, in wholesale prescriptions based on superficial analyses. Some features of the Chinese model are not transferrable, being too deeply rooted in Chinese tradition or in the particular political and social conditions of post-1949 China. Only detailed studies of the complex interactions between different aspects of the Chinese rural system, based on micro-studies of the kind here proposed, will help sort out those institutional devices that are ineradicably Chinese from those that might conceivably be adopted fruitfully elsewhere -- most obviously in countries like Tanzania which share Chira's socialist predispositions but also in countries of a very different ideological complexion, such as Iran, which has already adopted a barefoot doctors programme. The project will also enable
specialists to observe how those programmes that are potentially transferrable actually operate at the grass-roots level.