Fei Xiaotong

Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung (November 2, 1910 – April 24, 2005) was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist.

He was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology; he was also noted for his studies in the study of China's ethnic groups as well as a social activist.

Fei Xiaotong was born in Wujiang County of Jiangsu province in China on November 2, 1910.

His world was one plagued with political corruption and abject poverty.

He grew up in a gentry but yet not wealthy family.

His father, Fei Pu'an (费朴安) was educated in the Chinese classics, earned a shengyuan civil service degree, studied in Japan, and founded a middle school.

Fei's mother, Yang Renlan (杨纫兰), the Christian daughter of a government official and also highly educated for her time, established a nursery school in Wujiang which Fei attended.

Her brothers include Chinese politician Yang Qianli (father of Hong Kong director and lyricwriter Evan Yang), Architect Yang Xiliu (S. J. Young), Chinese-American animator Cy Young, and entrepreneur Yang Xiren.

At missionary-founded Yenching University in Beiping, which had China's best sociology program, he was stimulated by the semester visit of Robert E. Park, the University of Chicago sociologist.

For an M.A. in anthropology, Fei went to nearby Tsinghua University where he studied with Pan Guangdan and learned fieldwork methods from a White Russian, S. M. Shirokogoroff.

Fei's first fieldwork experience, in the rugged mountains of Guangxi province in the far south, ended tragically after Fei's leg was crushed by a tiger trap, and his young bride Wang Tonghui (王同惠) died seeking help.

Starting in the late 1930s, he and his colleagues established Chinese sociology and his works were instrumental in laying a foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China, as well as in introducing social and cultural phenomena of China to the international community.

From 1936 to 1938 Fei studied at the London School of Economics under the pioneer anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.

"From Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Fei learned to focus on the functional interrelationships of various "parts" of a community and on the meaning of a culture as seen by its members. He devised survey methods which incorporated the functional approach ... " Fei wrote his 1938 PhD thesis, based on earlier fieldwork in Kaixiangong (Chinese:) village, China and published it as Peasant Life in China (1939).

Among Fei Xiaotong's contributions to anthropology is the concept that Chinese social relations work through social networks of personal relations with the self at the center and decreasing closeness as one moves out.

Among the criticisms of Fei Xiaotong's work is that his work tended to ignore regional and historical variations in Chinese behavior.

Nonetheless, as a pioneer and educator, his intent was to highlight general trends, thus this simplification may have had significant justification for Fei's intent, even if they contributed to a bias in studies of Chinese society and culture.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Fei played an important role in national intellectual and ideological life, and before long he began to hold a growing number of political positions.

He was made vice president in 1951 of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Beijing (today, Minzu University of China), and in 1954 attended the First National People's Congress as a member of the Nationalities Affairs Commission.

Soon thereafter, however, departments of sociology were eliminated (as a "bourgeois pseudo-science").

Fei no longer taught, and published less and less.

An important work of the period, China's Gentry, was compiled from Fei's field interviews, and was published in the United States in 1953.

It went on to become a staple of American university courses on China.

The compilation and U.S. publication of China's Gentry grew out of a relationship Fei developed at Tsinghua University with the University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield and his wife, Margaret Park Redfield.

During the “Hundred Flowers” thaw of 1956–57, he began to speak out again, cautiously suggesting the restoration of sociology.

But then the climate suddenly changed with the “Anti-Rightist Movement.” In 1957, Fei stood with head bowed before countless assemblies to confess his “crimes toward the people.” Hundreds of articles attacked him, not a few by colleagues, some viciously dishonest.

Fei became an outcast, humiliated, isolated, unable to teach, do research, or publish.

Twenty-three years of his life, he would later write, years that should have been his most productive period, were simply lost, wasted.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, physically attacked by Red Guards, forced to clean toilets, he contemplated suicide.

In the 1970s, Fei, internationally known, began to receive foreign visitors, and after Mao's death he was asked to direct the restoration of Chinese sociology.

He visited the United States again and was subsequently able to arrange the visits to China of American social scientists to help with the gigantic task of training a whole new cadre of Chinese sociologists.

In 1980 he was formally rehabilitated, and was one of the judges in the long, televised trial of the Gang of Four and others held responsible for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution.

His 'second life' was more than ever that of the public intellectual, with important political posts and contact with policy makers.

His influence is thought to have been important in convincing the government to promote rural industry, whose rapid growth in the 1980s raised the income of hundreds of millions of villagers all over China.

A representative example of his work is Fei's 1988 Tanner lecture in Hong Kong, "Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese Nationality."

Virtually every week in the 1990s his name was in the newspapers and his face on television.

He traveled all over China, went abroad, to the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere, and was showered with international honors: the Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an honorary doctorate from the University of Hong Kong, and other honors in Japan, the Philippines, Canada.

He played a role in promoting and directing the reestablishment of sociology and anthropology in China, training scholars and developing teaching materials after thirty years of prohibition.

Fei is also known for his influential theory on ethnic groups in Chinese history, which follows the tradition of Lewis H. Morgan's stage-developmental evolutionism.

His last post before his death in 2005 was as Professor of Sociology at Peking University.