Fei Xiaotong

Fei Xiaotong (1910-2005) was a Chinese sociologist and social anthropologist widely regarded as the founder of Chinese sociology and social anthropology as academic disciplines. Trained in Britain under Bronislaw Malinowski, he brought functionalist ethnographic method to the study of Chinese village life, publishing Peasant Life in China (1939) from fieldwork in a Yangtze delta community. His later work From the Soil (1948) introduced the concept of chaxugeju, describing Chinese social relations as concentric personal networks radiating outward from the individual rather than the bounded groups of Western sociology. He spent decades studying rural industrialization and small-town development as pathways for China's modernization, and remained a major public intellectual and academic leader after his political rehabilitation following the Cultural Revolution.