The question which naturally arises is: how reliable are they as informants. Clearly we will have no definitive answer to that question unless we are able to visit the village and see for ourselves, but the following points can be made:
1.
These are not the kind of refugees who seek to blacken the regime they have deserted in justification of their own decision to leave. Most of them in fact remain convinced that socialist agriculture is preferable to private ownership (though a couple do not). Almost all of them moreover hold warm memories and feelings for the village in which they came of age.
Their reasons for leaving were largely as described above, rather than hostility to the regime or village. Their motives for talking to us appear to be chiefly those of friendship (several of them have become quite close friends) and the pleasure of recounting to sympathetic listeners some of the most exciting and emotionally charged incidents in their lives.
2. We can cross-check. We have obtained various versions of the same incidents from different informants. They do, of course, have their own biases; and we have found these views and prejudices often reflect the particular statuses they occupied in the village. Their perspectives on some of the village's more controversial economic issues, for example, depend in large measure on which production team within the village they belonged to and the interests of that team. We have similarly found that the informants who held village posts still tend to view the village's past events very much from the vantage-point of their own former functions.
If handled properly, these different biases can hopefully be put to our own advantage, in that they can help us to begin to understand better the different forces and sectoral interests at work in the village.
3.
In one respect, however, our main informants are relatively homogeneous. They were all city youths -- long-term residents and full participants in the village's affairs, but still outsiders. not members of the village clan. Insofar as what they relate to us are not only objective facts but also interpretations, those interpretations are likely to be coloured -- uniformly coloured by this shared characteristic. We have tried to cross-check in this respect too by interviewing farmers, 'insiders' born in the village. We have already found and interviewed two such -people and hope. to interview more. But it is much harder to get "such former-farmers to talk:- valuable though they are
respondents, they are not as skilled either in recall, or in accurately comprehending or relating any statistical information, or in articulating views and interpretations. Nevertheless, we hope to derive some basis from these interviews for controlling the bias of our central respondents. Even if we fail and end up with, essentially, a vicarious participant observation study carried out by middle class Canton youths and reported on by us, .we can reasonably claim that our informants are better participant observers than any likely to get to the Chinese countryside in the near future, even if they did not have a, graduate school training in research methodology before they were "sent down".
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