We know the Chinese as villagers who carefully tend small plots of land using family labor, marry young, want many sons, and live in extended families—"the Chinese Way." Now for the first time we find Han Chinese "cowboys" who raise dairy cows and herd sheep on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. This book, based on surveys and intensive interviews, compares family lives, the economy, and gender relations among Chinese herders and farmers. The authors find that livestock have brought new wealth and opportunities that change the Chinese farming-based way of life, and they explore how...

Following the formation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1977 and the beginning of a Sino-American scholarly exchange program in October 1978, a small number of foreigners has been able to conduct fieldwork in China after a hiatus of over thirty years. Welcomed though these new opportunities were by potential U.S. field researchers, the initial stage of enthusiasm was shortly overshadowed by both the difficulties foreign researchers faced in China and the imposition, in early 1981, of a temporary moratorium on long-term fieldwork by outsiders. Sober without being pessimistic,...