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 of China's ethnic groups as well as a social activist. 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. His last post before his death in 2005 was as Professor of Sociology at Peking University.
Fei Xiaotong was born in Wujiang County of Suzhou 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 émigré, S. M. Shirokogoroff. Fei's first fieldwork experience, in the rugged mountains of Guangxi province in the far south, ended tragically: Fei's leg was crushed by a tiger trap, and as his young and pregnant bride and research co-worker Wang Tonghui (王同惠) went to seek help, she fell into a pond and drowned.
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:開弦弓) 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.
In 1948, Fei published From the Soil, in which he discussed the agricultural basis for society in China. The text extensively used bucolic imagery.
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.
In China, Fei sought to promote the discipline of sociology.
Leading intellectual in People's Republic of China
1950s and 1960s: Politics in command
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. Fei was a key figure in the China Democratic League.
In 1950, Fei compared the governance of China to that of western democracies, writing
We have been familiar with the term 'democracy' for more than thirty years. What I found (in 1947) in America and England was something that looked like the real thing but was not. What I learned at the recent conference of people's representatives in Peking in six days exceeded all the knowledge that I had acquired on the subject in the previous six years. As soon as I set foot in the assembly hall I found a multitude of people in uniform, in working garb, in short dresses, in long gowns, in foreign-style clothes, in skull caps. This was the first time in my life I saw such a cosmopolitan crowd assembled together... These people did not come together as a result of elections held among the populace and formally they did not satisfy the conditions of democracy I had previously known. But could anybody like this be produced in Britain or the United States?...
This was dictatorship, it is true. But only because of such a dictatorship were we able to have democracy in our conference hall. Understanding dawned on me. I realized now how democracy and dictatorship could be blended together.
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 Campaign 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 Campaign. Public criticisms contended that Fei was a "big Rightist," a "poisonous weed," "anti-Party, anti-socialist," and "insidiously disgusting." He was spurned from academia. In response to these criticisms during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Fei admitted what he characterized at the time as "crimes".
1970s and 1980s: A 'second life'
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. 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.