topics: |  sociology | china | anthropology

Late in 1962, Myrdal, a young Swedish anthropologist and his wife broke all
precedents and were granted permitssion to settle down in a northern Chinese
village.

His interviews with Chinese villagers encompass agrarian revolt in the
countryside, counterrevolution, a revolution, and then the encoding of a
revolutionary regime into an institutional framework. The context is a the
small village, Liu Ling, in northern China near Yenan, and the story is about
massive structural (and individual) change.  Myrdal conducted interviews
there in 1961. Liu Ling was involved in the Communist revolution at an early
date.