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Early years[edit] 

Fei Xiaotong was born in Wujiang County of Jiangsu province in China onNovember 2, 1910. His world was one plagued with political corruption andabject 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 Niulan (杨纽兰), the Christian daughter of a government official and also

highly educated for her time, established a nursery school in Wujiang which Feiattended.

Career in academic sociology[edit] 

At missionary-founded Yenching University (燕京大学) in Beijing, 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 (Qinghua) University清华大学 where

he studied with Pan Guangdan and learned fieldwork methods from a WhiteRussian, S. M. Shirokogoroff. Fei’s first fieldwork experience, in the ruggedmountains 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.

"Functional" anthropology[edit] 

From 1936 to 1938 Fei studied at the London School of Economics under thepioneer anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. "From Malinowski and A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, Fei learned to focus on the functional interrelationships ofvarious "parts" of a community and on the meaning of a culture as seen by itsmembers. He devised survey methods which incorporated the functionalapproach . . . . "[2]:17 Fei wrote his 1938 PhD thesis, based on earlier fieldwork in

Kaixian’gong《开弦弓》 village, China—not far from where he had been born

and raised—and published it as Peasant Life in China (1939).

Among Fei Xiaotong's most important contributions to anthropology is theconcept 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 ignoreregional and historical variations in Chinese behavior; nonetheless, as a pioneerand educator, his intent was to highlight general trends, thus this simplificationmay have had significant justification for Fei's intent, even if they contributed to abias in studies of Chinese society and culture.

An important work of the period, China's Gentry , was compiled from Fei's field

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interviews, and was published in the United States in 1953. It went on to becomea staple of American university courses on China. The compilation and U.S.publication of China's Gentry grew out of a relationship Fei developed atTsinghua University with the University of Chicago anthropologist RobertRedfield and his wife, Margaret Park Redfield.[2]:18 

"Plaintiff for the Chinese Peasants"[edit] 

Fei’s analysis of the village economy had convinced him that rural industry wasneeded to supplement agricultural earnings. Returning from England in 1938 to awar-torn China partly occupied by Japanese armies, Fei went to the wartimeintellectual center of Kunming in Yunnan in the far southwest, where he and hisstudents studied three villages. In the United States for a year in 1943 –44,Margaret Park Redfield helped him to translate these studies into Earthbound China (Fei and Chih-i Chang 1945), which again made the case for rural industry.

But in China it was not for his ethnographies that Fei was known (Peasant Life inChina appeared in Chinese translation only in 1986!). Fei’s Chinese fame was,rather, as master of lively and engaging articles commenting on society andcurrent affairs. As his popularity increased, so did the quantity of his writings;averaging five to eight articles a month, many were reprinted in books, of whichFei published no fewer than sixteen in the 1940s.

Role as Leading Intellectual in the People's Republic ofChina[edit] 

The '50s and '60s: Politics in command[edit] 

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Fei played animportant role in national intellectual and ideological life, and before long hebegan to hold a growing number of political positions. He was made vicepresident of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Peking in 1951, and in 1954attended the First National People's Congress as a member of the NationalitiesAffairs Commission.[2]:18 

Soon thereafter, however, departments of sociology were eliminated (as a"bourgeois pseudo-science") . Fei no longer taught, and published less and less.During the ―Hundred Flowers‖ thaw of 1956–57, he began to speak out again,

cautiously suggesting the restoration of sociology. But then the climate suddenlychanged with the ―Anti-Rightist Movement.‖ In 1957, Fei stood with head bowedbefore countless assemblies to confess his ―crimes toward the people.‖Hundreds of articles attacked him, not a few by colleagues, some viciouslydishonest. Fei became an outcast, humiliated, isolated, unable to teach, doresearch, or publish. Twenty-three years of his life, he would later write, yearsthat should have been his most productive period, were simply lost, wasted. At

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

The '70s and '80s: A second life[edit] 

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. Hevisited the United States again and was subsequently able to arrange the visits toChina of American social scientists to help with the gigantic task of training awhole 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‖ andothers held responsible for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution.

His second life was more than ever that of the public intellectual, with importantpolitical posts and contact with policy makers. His influence is thought to havebeen important in convincing the government to promote rural industry, whoserapid growth in the 1980s raised the income of hundreds of millions of villagersall over China. Virtually every week in the 1990s his name was in thenewspapers and his face on television. He traveled all over China, went abroad,to the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere, and was showeredwith international honors: the Malinowski Award of the Society for AppliedAnthropology, the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,an honorary doctorate from the University of Hong Kong, and other honors inJapan, the Philippines, Canada. He played a role in promoting and directing thereestablishment of sociology and anthropology in China, training scholars anddeveloping teaching materials after thirty years of prohibition.

Fei Xiaotong is also known for his influential theory on ethnic groups in Chinesehistory, which follows the tradition of Lewis H. Morgan's stage-developmentalevolutionism. A representative example of his work is Fei Xiaotong's 1988Tanner lecture in Hong Kong, "Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of theChinese Nationality". According to Fei, the Huaxia became a true ethnic group,the Han, during the Qin Dynasty. Afterwards, the Han became "a nucleus withcentripetal force", with their stable agricultural society attracting and assimilatingethnic nomads from China's northern frontier such as the Qiang.[3] 

The '90s and '00s: reminiscence and caution[edit] 

Above all, it was as a writer that Fei flourished in his second life. Virtually all ofhis old books were republished during these years, and he turned out new booksand articles in even greater quantity. Of the fifteen volumes of his ―Works‖ (1999–2001), new writings from the 1980s and '90s fill over half. Many of the themeswere familiar. He repeatedly and forcefully set forth the case for sociology andanthropology in China if modernization were to succeed. He reminisced about hisvillage fieldwork, his studies, and his teachers. There were articles and books onrural industrialization, small towns, national minorities, and developing frontier

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areas. He championed the cause of intellectuals. He recounted what he hadlearned from his trips abroad, and made some new translations from English.There was even a little book of his poetry. What is different in all this new writingis political caution; Fei had too much to do and too little time in these lastdecades to risk playing with fire again.

He was Professor of Sociology at Peking University at the time of his death onApril 24, 2005 in Beijing at the age of 94. A memorial has been set up in theDepartment of Sociology at the university, where he has taught and directedsince the 1980s.