Brilliant scholar overcame tragedy and revolution
Fei Xiaotong , China's most distinguished sociologist who has died aged 94, lost his wife in 1935 after just three months' marriage when she fell into a ravine.
The tragedy happened in September 1935 during field research in Guangxi when Fei stepped on a tiger trap and severely injured his foot. His wife, a fellow sociologist, died going to find help.
While recovering from injuries in his home town, Fei applied his training as a sociologist to study life in a nearby village. The resulting book, Peasant Life in China, established his reputation as a brilliant scholar.
Fei remarried in 1939 and had a daughter, Fei Zonghui.
Born in 1910, the youngest of five children in a Jiangsu family, Fei's father studied in Japan and his mother was a devout Christian.
As a young man, Fei wanted to become a doctor but changed his mind to study sociology. 'Understanding and changing China' became his mission and he breezed through Yenching University, earned a master's degree from Tsinghua University and won a scholarship to study in Britain.
He received a doctorate from the London School of Economics in 1938 and returned to teach in China. In 1943, he spent a year in the US on research and lecturing.
Fei was a member of the Democratic League. When several of his fellow members were shot dead by the Nationalists, he condemned the assassinations, driving him to the communists by default.
In the 1950s, sociology was condemned as a 'capitalist science' and Fei, like many intellectuals at the time, fell silent. When reforms began in 1979, he became an iconic figure, in part because as early as the 1930s he had reasoned that, given China's huge population and scarcity of arable land, household industries, such as the production of raw silk, were vital to the economic survival of peasants. This argument fitted well with the reform agenda of Deng Xiaoping .
Fei set out to rebuild sociology as an academic discipline, emphasising the work of field studies and surveys. He recruited sociologists from the US as professors in leading universities to train a new generation of Chinese sociologists in methodology and theories.
He returned to the villages where he conducted early research and documented the changes over half a century. Maintaining a high energy level, he lectured and continued writing into his 90s.
During the 1989 student-led democracy movement, Fei was credited with advising then Shanghai party secretary Jiang Zemin . He remained a trusted aide after Mr Jiang became party general secretary and president.
