19 Facts About Fei Xiaotong

Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist.

Fei Xiaotong was a pioneering researcher and professor of sociology and anthropology; he was noted for his studies in the study of China's ethnic groups as well as a social activist.

Fei Xiaotong was born in Wujiang County of Jiangsu province in China on November 2,1910.

Fei Xiaotong's world was one plagued with political corruption and abject poverty.

Fei Xiaotong grew up in a gentry but yet not wealthy family.

Radcliffe-Brown, Fei Xiaotong 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.

Fei Xiaotong devised survey methods which incorporated the functional approach.

The compilation and US publication of China's Gentry grew out of a relationship Fei Xiaotong developed at Tsinghua University with the University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield and his wife, Margaret Park Redfield.

Fei Xiaotong was made vice president in 1951 of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Beijing, and in 1954 attended the First National People's Congress as a member of the Nationalities Affairs Commission.

Fei Xiaotong became an outcast, humiliated, isolated, unable to teach, do research, or publish.

Fei Xiaotong visited the United States again and was 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.

Fei Xiaotong's 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.

Fei Xiaotong 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.

Fei Xiaotong 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.

Above all, it was as a writer that Fei Xiaotong flourished in his 'second life'.

Fei Xiaotong reminisced about his village fieldwork, his studies, and his teachers.

Fei Xiaotong recounted what he had learned from his trips abroad and made some new translations from English.

Fei Xiaotong was Professor of Sociology at Peking University at the time of his death on April 24,2005, in Beijing at the age of 94.

Fei Xiaotong made significant contributions to the study and management of the development of China's rural economy.