Only a handful of village studies on pest-1949 China exist, written by the few foreigners who have had direct access to rural Chinese communities: most notably William Hinton's account of a 1940s village, the Crooks' work of the 1950s, Jan Myrdal's interviews in a Shensi village during the 1960s, and Jack Chen's account of his stay in a village in 1969-70. Their findings, especially the recent ones of Myrdal and Chen, have provided valuable information about rural China, but they only tell part of the story of Chinese village life.
As a guest in the village, Jan Myrdal conducted formal interviews through interpreters and under circumstances where it was inappro- priate to touch upon the "backstage" areas of village life. Jack Chen faced even broader constraints; sent to a village for a year by his May 7th cadre school, he had neither the time nor the conditions to carry out systematic enquiries, and he therefore contents himself with descriptions of the agricultural cycles and the seasonally changing diets, work-chores and festivities.
The three researchers who would be involved in this project hope to be able to complement and go beyond the work done by Myrdal and Chen through a detailed case study of a Chinese village over the last ten years. We have already begun this research. While engaged in separate research projects in Hong Kong in 1974-6 on rather different themes, we became acquainted with a dozen young people who had quite recently emigrated from a single Chinese farming community, and we were able to carry out more than 300 hours of interviews with them.
Our present application is for funds to complete the interviewing task and so maximize the advantage to be gained from this very rich source of information on life in a contemporary south China village.
Other research has, of course, made use of interviews with former villagers. But the proposed study contains the unusual opportunity, so far as we know never before available to Western scholars outside China, to interview several people from the same village who have experienced the same events. This will allow us to cross-check the details of their accounts of village life; interviewee's recollections can be laid out against independent interviews with other respondents.
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This pool of knowledgeable information has permitted us to begin probing systematically into many of the complexities of village life that Myrdal and Chen left untouched, not just the formal structures but also the informal patterns and networks that help determine the local attitudes and that help shape village decisions.
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'William Hinton: Fanshen, Monthly Review Press, 1966; David and
Isabel Crook: Revolution in a Chinese Village, Routledge, London, 1959, and The First Years of Yangyi Commune, Routledge, London, 1966; Jan Myrdal: Report from a Chinese Village, Random House, N.Y 1965, and China: The Revolution Continued, Random House, 1970; and Jack Chen: A Year in Upper Felicity, Harrap & Co., London, 1973.
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