Page &
novel for Western scholars outside China, to interview a number of 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; one interviewee's recollections can be laid out against independent interviews with other respondents.
The purpose of the study is primarily descriptive;
to provide the type of information and data about practices in the Chinese countryside that scholars of Third World development can utilize to develop specific ideas and analyses that might be of value to other developing nations.
We brought certain initial questions and interests to our research, dealing with:
(a) the conflicts between tradition and modernity
in the Chinese countryside;
(b) the structural and attitudinal prerequisites for
rural economic development in China's socialist context.
As our interviews progressed and we learned more about the village, new and more precise focusses of interest emerged; as examples,
(a) how relations between leaders and led are handied, and how these affect village investment decisions;
(b) how the different remuneration systems that have been tried have influenced peasant attitudes towards their work and toward each other;
(c) the politics of water control and irrigation schemes;
(d) how the public health cooperative and birth-control
programme both influence and are influenced by changing village attitudes toward disease, life- expectancy and children.
C.
PROGRAMME.
20. Proposed Research schedule: From our interviews to date, we have compiled about 1500 typed single-spaced pages of interview notes, but the subjects we are examining are complex and wide gaps in our knowledge of village life remain. Our estimate is that our research is presently almost half completed and that (a) we shall need to do four more months of intensive interviewing in order to secure as accurate a picture of the village as possible from our informants. Moreover, (b) we are hoping to extend our interviewing to a wider range of informants born within the village. In addition, (c) we have yet to complete the greater part of our interviewing with informants from other South China villages. Finally (d) we will need to delve further into the documentary evidence from China in order to better link our own interview findings with national policies and trends. All told, six months of field work in Hong Kong by two researchers would be required.