Cultures

200

Although Half Moon Village is only one of many villages in China, learning about it in the PRC's highly transformative years offers an important insight into the complex whole of which it is a part.

Invited to give a series of five lectures on American education in five Chinese universities shortly after Present Nixon's first visit in 1972 led to additional opportunities for my wife and I to return to China - the most significant of which was an invitation to live and work in Half Moon Village outside Beijing in the fall and early winter of 1979.

Ten years later, a close friend who had grown up in China returned to the village immediately following the Tiananmen Square protest. His analysis of the villager's response to the government crackdown offers a unique final chapter to the book's overall ethnographic analysis.