Class structure in rural centers. Overlapping with hereditary or familial organizations where they exist, and existing independently in any event, will be found a class structure of varying extent and intensity. The Chinese village system is founded, for example, upon a basic division into two classes of peasantry and gentry, with outside traders, officials and freebooters entering into the village as foreign but powerful interlopers. The elders of the principal gentry families are the ruling group for local policies and treat with the outsider on matters that involve the hsien or village with the outside world. But this is only one of many possible rural class structures.
American surveys show more complicated, indeterminate and multiple class tendencies.
A study of a rural central New York community revealed eleven distinct levels of prestige among the population of 1235 persons. The rating of the people were made by a panel of 14 community members. The operator should not feel some absolute number of classes necessarily exists. A rural caste system is likely to be very tight between castes, but otherwise the important question to answer is how people stand or relation to one another and in relation to the outside world, with respect to the criteria of prestige and wealth in order to ascertain their appropriateness and vulnerability to the message. Figure 8 XX-5.