Stephen Endicott is Associate Professor of History at York University in Ontario. If it s printed it seems true. But you might be having the wool pulled over your eyes. Each month the NI invites one author to justify their style of argument. You start with a description of a rural scene which is very different from the rest of the article.
Initial impressions are real but they are usually misleading because reality is more complex.
The purpose of my introduction is not to mislead the readers but to let them know how I felt on first approaching the village, to give a sense of what seems enduring as a base from which to understand the dialectics of change. The implication of your piece is that MaGaoqiao can serve as a barometer of what is going on in rural China. But it is one village in a country of 716,000 villages. Mao Zedong called it dissecting a sparrow and recommended it for anyone wishing to conduct rural surveys. All I would claim is that my report is a barometer for Sichuan province.