Historical Perspectives on Rural Social Change in Modern China

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Although many studies of Chinese rural society have been published in recent years, very few of them have been able to provide any continuity with the pre-revolutionary history of the villages studied by project took as its subjects Chinese villages that were studied by Japanese researchers in the early 1940s. We chose those villages because the detailed records of the original studies provide a base line from which to measure the changes that have occurred in the last fifty years.Eight researchers from Japan joined a team of Chinese researchers from the history department of Nankai University to study the social history of the selected villages. The first stage of the project was conducted during the summer of 1990 when the joint research team visited two villages, Shajing in Xunyi county and Wudian in Fangshan district. Botk are attached to Beijing municipality. During those visits the research team broke into small groups to interview village residents, collecting the life histories … More of older residents and gathering statistical data, genealogies of all village families, and other records. Since Wudian village had not been visited by foreign researchers since the 1940s visit of the original Japanese research team, we have made that village the focus for the first stage of the project, and a volume of interview transcripts and other data will be published in June 1992 by Uchiyama Shoten.The second stage of the project (1991) involved the participation of most of the members in a conference on North China rural society. Following the conference we planned to return to Wudian, but were unable to obtain permission from the Chinese Ministry of Education to continue that work. As the best available alternative, out Nankai colleagues arranged for us to spend a week "visiting" the village of Fengjiazhuang in Jinghai county, greater Tianjin municipality. This village had also been briefly studied by the Mantetsu research team in the 1940s. During that visit we were able to conduct 42 interviews with village residents and to collect a wide range of data including original materials on land reform. These interview tapes, as all of those from the first year's project, have been transcribed and will be translated and edited to form the second volume in our reports on north China village society.During 1991 two of our Nankai colleagues, Profs. Zuo Zhiyuan and Zhang Hongxiang visited Japan for 18 days. During their time in Japan they visited and gave presentations at Hitotsubashi University, Sophia University and Osaka University of Foreign Studies and exchanged views with Japanese specialists in the fields of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Less