Fei Xiaotong

Works

• 1939Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley

  Doctoral thesis written at the LSE on Kaixiangong, a village on Lake Tai: kinship, land tenure, the household economy and the silk industry in a time of change; Malinowski’s preface praised it as a study by an anthropologist of his own society.

• 1947From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society

  Fourteen short essays drawn from lectures on rural society, printed in 1947 and as a book in 1948: rural China is rooted in the soil, a society of familiarity governed by rites rather than law; its relationships form a “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju), circles around each self like ripples on water, unlike the Western “organisational mode”.

Position

Fei Xiaotong is on the map for his account of the social order of rural China and as a founder of sociology and anthropology in China. “Peasant Life in China” (1939) applied Malinowski’s functionalist fieldwork to a Chinese village; Malinowski’s preface praised it as the work of an anthropologist studying his own society. In “Xiangtu Zhongguo” (From the Soil, 1947–48) Fei described rural China as “earthbound”: people stay where they are born, village life is a society of familiarity in which customs are learned by practice, and order rests on rites (li) and the authority of elders rather than on law, so that going to court is a matter of shame. His best-known concept is the “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju): in Western societies, he wrote, people form groups with clear boundaries, like neatly tied bundles of firewood – an organisation-based mode of association; in China each person stands at the centre of circles of relationships that grow weaker as they widen, like the ripples when a stone is thrown into water, so that duties and morality depend on the relationship – an “egocentrism” that is not individualism. Later he wrote on small towns and rural industry and, in the 1990s, on “cultural self-awareness” (wenhua zijue): those who live in a culture should know its origins and character in order to live together with other cultures. Chaxu geju became one of the most discussed concepts of Chinese social science; critics argue, for instance, that it captures closeness by kinship better than the hierarchy of rank (Wu Fei) or that the differential and the organisational mode exist side by side in every society (Xie Lizhong).

Life & context

Fei Xiaotong was born on 2 November 1910 in Wujiang near Suzhou in Jiangsu. He studied sociology at Yenching University in Beijing, where a semester’s visit by the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park in 1932 drew him to field research, and anthropology at Tsinghua University with S. M. Shirokogoroff. In 1935 he undertook fieldwork among the Yao in Guangxi with his wife Wang Tonghui, who died in an accident there; while recovering he studied the village of Kaixiangong on Lake Tai. At the London School of Economics he studied with Bronisław Malinowski from 1936 and took his doctorate in 1938; the thesis appeared in 1939 as “Peasant Life in China”. Back in China he directed field studies in Yunnan during the war (“Earthbound China”, 1945, with Zhang Zhiyi) and taught at Yunnan and Tsinghua universities; “Xiangtu Zhongguo” appeared in 1947–48. After 1949 he worked on the classification of China’s ethnic minorities. In the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 he was condemned as a “rightist” and for two decades excluded from academic work. Rehabilitated in 1980, he led the restoration of sociology in China, studied small towns and rural industry, chaired the China Democratic League (1987–96) and was a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (1988–98). He died in Beijing on 24 April 2005.

Further main works

• Earthbound China (with Zhang Zhiyi, 1945)
• Xiangtu Zhongguo (From the Soil, 1947–48)
• Xiangtu chongjian (Rural Reconstruction, 1948)
• China’s Gentry (ed. M. P. Redfield, 1953)
• Small Towns in China (1986)