(c) The value of the project to the ODM is presumably
an extension of the project's value to developing countries as suggested above in contributing to the general pool of knowledge on the efficacy of rural development programmes.
B.
Methodology.
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14-17 On Interviewees and the Reliability of our Methodology.
Ten of our respondents are educated youths from the city of Canton: four women and six men. Seven of them settled in the village as teenage volunteers in 1964, and three others in 1968. Though they are not life-long farmers, they stayed in the village not as visitors but as regular labouring peasants, some of them for a decade or more, and were accepted as such by the other village members. Their knowledge of the village its institutions and customs, policy debates and production techniques is both intimate and extensive.
Due to their literacy and schooling (which few of the peasant villagers possessed), our informants occupied a variety of specialist posts in the village, and are able to offer us data on the village economy and detailed accounts of how different village organizations operate and how decisions get made. For example, two former production-team accountants have been able to draw up for us a census and a rough estimate of the quantity and sources of incomes for each of their teams' households, which will better allow us to examine the economic factors that make some families prosperous and others more poorly off. Other informants can offer equally detailed information for a wide range of the village's institutional affairs: former team cashiers, a team procurement officer, a village factory worker, a barefoot doctor, an agricultural experimentation officer, village broadcaster, Revolutionary Committee (village management committee) member, and peasant association official.
:
They all individually left the village between 1972 and 1976. One was a 'legal' emigrant, and the others "swam out" for a variety of personal reasons, of which two stand out as most prominent:
(a) the financial difficulties encountered in the
Chinese countryside by single young people, who cannot on their own save sufficient money to get married and therefore face lifelong celibacy;
(b) the growing feeling among most of the interviewees
that they were not needed by the village, as the local youths, who had been educated and trained by them began to take over their posts and responsibilities. One respondent, who had risen to be a village leader only to be shunted gently aside by the villagers' preference for their own children as leaders, recalls what occurred with a mixture of pride and resentment: "We cultivated so many of these local young people along. It was like a silkworm 'spinning its cocoon and thus destroying itself because of the product that it has made".