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Fei Xiaotong wrote the fourteen essays of “Xiangtu Zhongguo” from his lectures on rural society in the 1940s; they were printed in 1947 and published as a book in Shanghai in 1948, and an English translation by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng appeared in 1992 as “From the Soil”. The first essay calls Chinese society, at its base, “earthbound”: farmers live from the soil, rarely move and know one another from birth, so that village life is a society of familiarity in which writing is hardly needed. The central essay introduces the “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju). Western societies, Fei argued, are organised like bundles of firewood – groups with clear boundaries to which members belong equally; in China each person stands at the centre of circles of relationships that grow weaker as they spread, like the ripples when a stone is thrown into water, so that obligations and morality depend on the relationship and the line between public and private shifts with the standpoint. Later essays describe an order maintained by rites (li) rather than law, in which going to court is shameful, the rule of elders, and the move from kinship to locality. Chaxu geju has remained one of the most discussed concepts of Chinese social science.

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