Fage 7
Historical Background: Our efforts to interview persons born in the village will hold a second function. Men from the village have been migrating to Hong Kong for a good number of decades, and we are hoping to be able to place the past decade's events into longer historical perspective through their personal recollections (even if no longer verifiable) of pre-Liberation days, of the period of land reform, of the founding of agricultural collectives, and the Great Leap Forward. There is special interest to such an enquiry, in that ours will be the first full-scale study of a south China village in more than two decades.
The wider context: The main aim of our renewed research will be to deepen our knowledge of our chosen village. We intend also, however, to broaden our perspective somewhat by interviewing a number of respondents from other villages up to half a dozen such villages in Kwangtung province. This comparative work has already begun.
One of our purposes, certainly, will be to test some of our hypotheses by reference to villages other than the one we are studying. Certain of these hypotheses which are related to village-level variables will be made more plausible in the light of data from such other localities; we could then suggest with greater certainty that, for example, particular practices in the village result from its being a single- clan village, or that, say, there exists a certain set of reasons why team cadres and leaders in the village emerge predominently from particular class backgrounds.
But the main purpose of going beyond our single village will not be hypothesis-testing but rather simply will be at the descriptive level, to provide a rough check on the representativeness of the various customs and attitudes, political structures and economic mechanisms that we have found in this one village. Inevitably many of our readers will want to know about rural development in China as a whole: what sort of policies have entailed what sort of consequences in general. Whatever we say, they will read the book in that light; Our work is, indeed, aimed at the type of readership for example, Third World development specialists who would hold that kind of broader interest. It will be useful, therefore, for us to be able to make some reasoned statements about typicality.
19. Abstract of our Purpose and Methodology.
The study will trace the history of a farming village in Kwangtung Province, China, between 1964 and 1974. Our goal will be to provide a comprehensive view of this single village's economy, its local politics, and the changes in life patterns and attitudes amongst villagers over the past decade.
The study is based primarily upon interviews with a dozen to a dozen-and-a-half former inhabitants of this single farming community, who are now living in Hong Kong. A comparative perspective on this village will be gained by interviewing former residents of other Kwangtung villages, and documentary work using materials from China will help us link our interview findings about the village to the national policies and trends.
The point of origin of the study was a chance opportunity,
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