ABSTRACT
The prospects for employing a source, actual fieldwork within China, have improved, and a select few have been allowed to carry on field research for extended periods of time in both rural and urban communities. In this chapter the author agrees with Anne Thurston that given sane of the current difficulties with academic exchanges, flexibility is a necessary virtue. The social landscape of the commune became clearer as she sat down with old farmers and reconstructed the ethnographic history of the area during pre-revolutionary times—the land tenure system, lineage organization, periodic markets, marriage patterns, village feuds, local bullies, and power relations. During liberal phases, communes in the periphery suffer from a lack of connections that would stimulate the growth of enterprises. Great Leap Forward also promoted the growing of winter wheat in rice strains subtropical area of Guangdong in response to radical calls for paying primary attention to the cultivation of grain.
