Part III of this study is based largely on data collected through interviews conducted in Hong Kong with former residents of China. The use of such émigré interviews as source material for academic research developed primarily among American scholars during the 1960s and 1970s to satisfy growing interest at a time when the state of diplomatic relations between the two countries precluded any kind of research in China itself. With published Chinese materials both restricted and ever more polemical in content after 1958, the émigré interview became an increasingly useful approach, whether as a substitute for survey research or as an oral history supplement for documentary studies. Most interviewing was done at the old Universities Service Centre on Argyle Street. The centre was set up originally, in the early 1960s, to facilitate independent scholarly research based on published materials from China, which were more easily collected at that time in Hong Kong than elsewhere. But the centre also maintained just the right combination of run-down academic respectability and detached anonymity necessary to accommodate interviewing, which became in later years its most important function.

As a latter-day convert to the method, I began interviewing sporadically in the late 1970s to supplement information gleaned during brief trips to China in 1975, 1977, and 1978, which in turn were providing bits and pieces of data for journal articles on changes in education policy. The Hong Kong interviews were also begun in hopeful preparation for a more systematic study in China itself to ask the same kinds of education development questions about the costs and benefits of Cultural Revolution policies implemented during the early 1970s.