Fei Hsiao-t'ung (2 November 1910-), social anthropologist, became known in CKina as a pioneer in field research. He applied Western anthropological theories and methods to Chinese data.

Wuchiang, Kiangsu, was the birthplace of Fei Hsiao-t'ung. His family belonged to the local gentry, but was not wealthy. He had two brothers, Fei Ch'ing and Fei Chen-tung. Little is known about his childhood except that he attended a girls school for several years. Fei attended Yenching University, where he studied under University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. At this time, Chinese data for sociological research were almost nonexistent because so few field studies had been conducted. Visiting professors in China (such as Robert Park and R. H. Tawney, the author of Land and Labor in China) deplored this lack and encouraged Fei and other students to conduct field studies. Fei was among the Yenching students who began their field studies under the leadership of Wu Wen-tsao {see under Hsieh Wan-ying) .

After being graduated in 1933, he studied at Tsinghua under S. M. Shirokogoroff, a Manchu specialist. In 1935-36 Fei and his wife, Wang Tung-wei, studied the Yao minority in Kwangsi. On the field trip, Fei fell into a tiger trap, and his wife drowned in a river when trying to get help. The results of their research were published by the Commerical Press in 1936 as Hua-lan-yao she-hui tsu-chih — Kuang-hsi-sheng hsiang-hsien tung-nan hsiang [the social organization of the Hua-lan-yao, an aboriginal tribe in Kwangsi] .

Late in 1936 Fei went to England. He studied under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics and received a Ph.D in social anthropology. His thesis was entitled "K'ai-hsien-kung: Economic Life in a Chinese Village." 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 own members. He devised survey methods which incorporated the functional approach and discovered that these new methods elicited far more meaningful responses than the social survey methods used by J. L. Buck and other investigators of rural conditions in China. Fei's methods were demonstrated by his book Peasant Life in China (1939). After returning to China, Fei became a professor of social anthropology at National Yunnan University, a research fellow of the Sino-British Foundation (1939-41), and the director of the Yenching-Yunnan Station for Sociological Research. Between 1939 and 1943 Fei and his colleagues at the research station made studies of selected communities in the Kunming hinterland. In 1943 Fei was invited to visit the United States by the Department of State. He lectured and did research at Harv-ard University, the University of Chicago, and the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York. At the 1944 Harris Foundation Conference, held at the University of Chicago, he read a paper describing his Yunnan field work. His Earthbound China (1945), written with Chang Chih-i, compared three of the hinterland communities, representing three degrees of concentration of land ownership and tenancy. Fei recommended the introduction of rural cooperative industry, with land ownership of small units, but with land management of considerably larger units. During this period, Fei translated Bronislaw Malinowski's Theory of Culture and Raymond W. Firth's Human Types. Both were published in 1944. In an essay, "Peasantry and Gentry," published in the American Journal of Sociology in July 1946, Fei characterized China as a twoclass society, with a large peasantry and a small gentry differentiated from each other by kinship patterns, residence, economic and political roles, attitudes, and values. He showed that the opposition between peasantry and gentry in traditional China had been kept within bounds by economic interdependence, relatively high social mobility, political cooperation in the face of imperial demands, and a common social ethic. In the 1940's Fei came into conflict with the National Government and the Kuomintang. After the assassination of Wen I-to (q.v.) in July 1946, Fei took refuge in the American consulate at Kunming. Later that year, Fei, who had become professor of anthropology at Tsinghua University, visited England under the auspices of the British Council. He arrived in England in November 1946 and remained there for three months. He spent most of his time at the London School of Economics, but also visited Oxford and spent a brief period in the Oxfordshire village of Kirklington studying aspects of rural life.

After returning to China in 1947, Fei taught at Tsinghua. His Sheng-yü chih-tu [systems of child rearing] was published in 1947. It analyzed the institution of child-raising, with particular reference to the Chinese family system. In Hsiang-Vu Chung-kuo [rural China], Fei contrasted traditional China, viewed as a rural type of society, and modern society. This book also summarized Fei's views on the village. In 1948 Fei published Alei-kuo-jen hsing-ko [first visit to America], Hsiang-Vu ch" ung-chien [rural reconstruction], and Shen-ch' üan yü huangch^üan [gentry power and imperial power]. During this period, Fei also wrote newspaper articles criticizing aspects of traditional Chinese society and, indirectly, the political and social policies of the Kuomintang. At Tsinghua, he came to know Professor Robert Redfield, a University of Chicago anthropologist, and his wife, Margaret Park Redfield. Because Fei hoped to acquaint Western readers with the ideas he had expressed in newspaper articles, in the autumn of 1948 he dictated rough translations of his articles to Mrs. Redfield. After returning to the United States, she revised and edited the translations and supplemented them with six life-histories of Chinese gentry collected by Yung-teh Chow in Yunnan between 1943 and 1946. The resulting book, published at Chicago in 1953 with an introduction by Professor Redfield, was entitled China s Gentry. Immediately after the Communist occupation of north China, Fei was appointed to the university affairs committee which temporarily managed Tsinghua University. From November 1949 until 1954 he was a member of the culture and education committee of the Government Administration Council. Beginning in 1949 he was also a member of the executive committee of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, becoming a member of its second executive board in 1954. His other offices included: deputy director of the culture and education department of the central committee of the China Democratic League; member representing the China Democratic League in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; and member of the executive committee of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.

In 1950, as deputy leader of a good-will mission to the national minority groups, Fei went to southwest China to study several remote communities. In 1951 he became a member of the council of the China Political Science and Law Association; in June, he was made vice president of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Peking. From 1953 to 1954 he was a member of the culture aijd education committee of the Peking Municipal People's Government. He attended the First National People's Congress in August and September 1954 as a deputy representing Kiangsu province and as a member of the Nationalities Affairs Commission. In July 1955 Fei became a member of the executive board of the third session of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs. He was elected to the central committee of the China Democratic League in February 1956. In October, he became chief of the specialists bureau of the State Council.

In 1950 Fei had written a number of articles praising the "new democracy." In Wo che i-nien [this year of my life] he said that 1949 had been his year for hsueh-hsi, that is, intensive study of Chinese Communist doctrine. He criticized his fellow intellectuals for stinting in their efforts at thought reform and confessed the difficulties that he had encountered in attempting to reach the heights of proletarian consciousness. The same year, at a meeting at Tsinghua University, Fei had joined such professors as Chang Tung-sun, Tseng Chao-lun, Ch'ien Weich'ang, and Ch'ien Tuan-sheng in expressing disapproval of government plans to reorganize Chinese higher education along Soviet lines. Fei and many other scholars hoped that Chou En-lai's January 1956 speech on a new education policy might mean "re-liberation." During the so-called Hundred Flowers period, Fei said in an article published in the Jen-min jih-pao that although the new policies of socialist construction had brought economic improvement in China, they had not freed scholars to pursue research without fear or restraint. Intellectuals, he said, faced the uncertain weather of early spring, not knowing from day to day what to expect. He made a plea for "one room and two books" and freedom for uninterrupted study. As a result of this article and other public pronouncements of the same nature, Fei was severely criticized later in 1957 in the antirightist campaign. He was charged with being the leader of the so-called rightist intellectual faction of a group which allegedly was headed by Chang Po-chün and Lo Lung-chi (qq.v.). He also was accused of such intellectual heresies as supporting the so-called idealist sociology of Liang Shu-ming (q.v.) and favoring the' revival of capitalism. Fei confessed that his earlier statements reflected "an inaccurate estimate of the intellectuals" and declared that he intended to fight the rightists. The designation of Fei as a rightist was rescinded on 16 September 1959. On 11 April, he had been appointed to the Third Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference as a delegate from the China Democratic League.

In Fei's works of the 1950's, such as IVo che i-nien, he retracted his earlier lack of confidence in the Chinese people's potentialities for overcoming such obstacles as low income and capital accumulation, poor technology, and over-population. Under Communist leadership, he said, China could become a modern, industrialized country. His Min-chu hsien-fa jench'üan [the people's rights under a democratic constitution] was intended for the average reader who wished to grasp the "correct" meaning of constitutionalism, democracy, and civil rights. Fei's analysis of the Yi people in Liangshan, Kweichow, appeared in his Hsiungti min-tsu tsai Kuei-chou [a brother nationality in Kweichow] .

Fei remarried in 1942 and had one daughter by his second wife.