A sæcular saint of sociology

I recently finished reading David Arkush’s English-language biography of the great Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, a figure who somehow manages to become more and more impressive to me every time I read something about or by him. Being Eastern Orthodox, I do not use the word ‘saint’ lightly, and certainly here not in the strict hagiographical sense. But there are aspects of his life illuminated in this book that speak to a soul that was filled with love for those near to him, and to a temperament that was willing to forgive even his political enemies for more than a decade of gross personal injustice done to him, both to his face and in the press.

Fei Xiaotong was born to a slightly less-well-off gentry family in Jiangsu in 1910; his parents were both educated and members of the intelligentsia. His father was not religious in the slightest, but his mother Yang Renlan 楊紉蘭 was a devoted Christian, and had him sent to missionary schools for most of his early education. (For his own part, Fei Xiaotong seems to have come down in the middle – his writings evince a vague and ill-defined theism, but he never observed any religious discipline, and even called himself an ‘irreligious man’.) Fei continued his studies at Tsinghua, which had been established by Americans under the ‘Boxer indemnity’; it is thus fair to say that his education through college was deeply Westernised, Western-influenced and progressively-oriented. His major academic influences after Tsinghua were American urban sociologist Robert Park, Russian white émigré sociologist Sergei Shirokogoroff (a family friend of Alexander Kerensky who had cut his teeth on sociological research among the reindeer-herding Evenki people of Siberia, related to the Manchus) and Polish-British pioneer of functionalism Bronisław Malinowski. He didn’t see much use for Confucius as a schoolboy, but in his post-graduate work he came to a new appreciation of the classical philosopher, and quoted him numerous times in his later work From the Soil.

Yet despite Fei’s Westernised academic environment, his Western teachers and his generally Anglophile orientation to scholarship, such politics as he had were – if anything – amenable to a kind of mildly-conservative Chinese patriotism. His schooling happened in the context of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; his early professional life was situated in the looming context of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he and his brother Fei Qing 費青 criticised the Nationalist government of the time with accusations of cowardice in the face of foreign threats. This was the extent of his political involvement, however. For the most part, he was content to be absorbed in academic questions and sociological work.

Fei Xiaotong, as stated before, was never a Marxist; indeed, his tutoring under Shirokogoroff and Malinowski instilled in him a deep, Tory distrust of all forms of Whiggish and developmentalist social-scientific schemas. Malinowski in particular, possessed of what Ernest Gellner called an ‘anti-colonial moral intuition’, hated the condescension that ‘civilised’ Westerners deployed when talking about ‘primitive’ peoples, and much of his functionalist approach consisted of demonstrating the complexity and the utility of the social structures of non-Western cultures: this attitude is one that Fei himself took up with zeal. Taking the lead of his mentors – particularly Shirokogoroff’s studies of the Evenki, and Malinowski’s studies of the Trobrianders – Fei undertook his own field studies of minority communities in China, particularly the Yao people of Guangxi Province.

I will note again how important the Chinese southwest appears to be and continues to be as a physical location in the thought development of many left intellectuals of twentieth century China. Though the situation is slightly more complicated now, the inland southwest (Guangxi and Guizhou particularly) continues to be a ‘red’ beacon. The ancestral home of Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 was in Guangxi; that of Yan Yangchu 晏陽初 in Sichuan; and Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 spent much of his politically-formative professional life in Chongqing. It’s not an accident that Kunming was the capital of ‘Third Force’ politics: the populist leftism engendered in the Chinese southwest far predates Bo Xilai 薄熙來, Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元 and the slow-food movement.

Fei’s first wife, a bright young fellow sociologist named Wang Tonghui 王同惠, accompanied him on his field studies into Guangxi Province in 1935. Fei, who had unfortunately picked up a few pseudoscientific notions from Shirokogoroff about skull shapes, often busied himself with calipers among the Yao and travelled from village to village; Wang Tonghui, on the other hand, stayed mostly in one Yao village and used her social abilities and language skills to greater effect. However, this field study would end in tragedy. While hiking on an isolated rural backroad, Fei triggered a tiger trap which crushed his leg beneath a mass of rock. Wang Tonghui left to get help; however, she did not return that night or at all the following day. Fei, cold, thirsty, famished and in wrenching pain, managed to crawl his way to help. When he was well enough to do so, he asked his Yao rescuers to mount a search for his bride, for days to no avail. A week after the search was called, the Yao found Wang Tonghui’s body floating in a river: she had fallen off the road and drowned there.

Fei was devastated. He lost a great deal of weight in the years afterward, had to walk most of the time with a cane, and blamed himself for his wife’s death. He fell into depression and contemplated suicide. What saved him from taking his own life, by his own account, was a desire to be able to face his wife in the afterlife having done something useful with his life that she might take a professional interest in. His work, then, became his life. Moving back to Jiangsu Province and living with his elder sister, Fei Dasheng 費達生, he determined on using his sociological research to study, not isolated aboriginal groups, but instead the Chinese peasantry in the countryside around him – taking up a study of the peasant community in Kaixiangong 開弦弓. It seemed his sister encouraged him in this. She herself was involved in rural advocacy, self-help projects and the development of rural sericulture coöperatives for the impoverished and indebted peasants of Jiangsu. (In effect, she was doing much the same work that the itinerant lecturers of the Farmers’ Alliance had done in the United States two generations before, as Janez Evangelist Krek had done among the Slovenes, and as Svetozar Marković had done among the Serbs.) It was during this time of his life that Fei Xiaotong began advocating rural coöperatives and rural industrialisation. He moved back to the southwest and undertook a programme in Yunnan Province which mentored young sociology students.

He undertook a couple of trips abroad at this time, as well. He was on very friendly terms with American scholars, owing in large part to his training under Robert Park. He cultivated close relationships with the Fairbanks, Wilma and John, with Margaret Redfield and with Dorothea Mayo. Initially enthusiastic about America – being a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Henry Wallace’s contributions in particular – his impressions began to sour when he began noticing various facets of American life that didn’t agree with him. He didn’t like the ugliness of our urban industrialisation, the thick black smoke that hung over our cities in palls, or the square, faceless frames of our modernist architecture. He didn’t like Western food (with the exception of breakfast) or eating habits. He was disgusted with Jim Crow and anti-Chinese sentiment. He worried over American youths’ addiction to superhero comic books. And he was particularly appalled at the way we treated our elderly:

I know well all the tragedies of the [Chinese] big family, but… I became a reactionary and felt that to make sacrifices to bring up children and then watch them fly away like swallows, leaving one able only to sit on a cold park bench and feed sparrows, is just too cruel. I am glad I was not born in America.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he were seeing a society in decline. Fei Xiaotong briefly flirted with Western reactionary thought at this time – being particularly drawn to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, to whose thesis he would return after the Cultural Revolution was over. Fei saw China as an ‘Apollonian’ society in Spengler’s schema, a society whose creative energies were bent to the preservation and renewal of an established order; and America as a ‘Faustian’ society. In the years after the Cultural Revolution, his criticisms of American society were largely cultural-conservative: in particular, he deplored our ugly suburban sprawl, our skyrocketing divorce rate, our tolerance of crime and drug addiction, and the sexual licence which was evident in our academic life (being embarrassed in one particular case by an American female professor’s discussion of the Ming erotic novel Jin ping mei 《金瓶梅》).

Despite these conservative misgivings about the American spirit and its hostility toward the old, Fei was nevertheless an outspoken fan and proponent of the New Deal, and relentlessly criticised Truman in the wake of the war for having reneged on the promises made by his predecessor and funnelling that energy into the creation and maintenance of a global empire and an aggressive Cold War posture. He became a fervent critic – here again there are echoes of his mentor Malinowski – of the colonialist and imperialist policies pursued by the United States in the Third World in its shadow war with the Soviet Union. Fei Xiaotong was particularly critical of American military and financial support for the Chinese Guomindang 國民黨 in the postwar years, which he felt only worsened the lot of common Chinese people and legitimated a Communist takeover in their eyes.

Fei’s travels to Britain in the postwar era were much more positive in tenor. On good terms with Richard Henry Tawney, whose travels and studies in China had placed him within Fei Xiaotong’s circle of acquaintance, Fei quickly befriended several Labour backbenchers and watched in appreciation as the Labour government of Clement Attlee instituted various œconomic reforms to the benefit of the urban poor: job guarantees, public healthcare, public education, industrial policy. His one critique of British Labour was its continued dependence on American aid money and its subservience to American gæopolitics – he felt that eventually, Labour’s posture of dependency on America would trigger a massive rollback even of Britain’s admirable postwar social gains. (Thatcher sadly proved him right.)

As I mentioned in my previous piece on Fei Xiaotong, it was during this time that this previously rather apolitical or mildly-conservative professor of sociology became political. Fei may have been gentry, but he had managed to get a ground-level view of what the Guomindang’s policies were doing to the Chinese peasantry: bullying, conscription, deliberate starvation. He understood full well the appeal the Chinese Communist Party had for peasants driven to the edge by the casual brutality of Nationalist rule – but he did not join the Communists. Instead, Fei was drawn (initially thanks to his older brother) into the same Democratic League in which the aforementioned Liang Shuming, Yan Yangchu and Tao Xingzhi were particularly prominent. Fei Xiaotong, for all his admiration of English and American constitutionalism, followed the lead of his fellows in the League in that he never thought full democracy was feasible or desirable in a Chinese context.

Kunming – in particular the National Southwestern Associated University or Lianda 聯大 – under the rule of warlord Long Yun 龍雲 was the hotbed of Third Force politics. The Nationalist government was weak there, and the refugee academics from Japanese-held territory were more or less free to critique it. Fei was in good company among these refugee academics, though he also put down some local roots in the southwest. He married again, a woman of peasant upbringing named Meng Yin 孟吟, whom Fei praised affectionately for her humble, hospitable and hard-working character, and appreciated for the long hardships she endured together with him.

The safety promised by Long Yun in Kunming was not absolute, however. Fei Xiaotong and Meng Yin lived in fear of Japanese air raids, once leaving their home for the shelter of the woods while Meng was pregnant with their child – only to return to find their home destroyed. Also, Guomindang secret police and informants were everywhere, and they managed to assassinate Li Gongpu 李公樸 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 for speaking out against the government. Fei Xiaotong – along with the entirety of the Democratic League – bitterly condemned these shootings, but he himself along with a number of League supporters and their families had to take refuge in the American Consulate in Kunming to keep from being assassinated themselves, and were later evacuated to Nanjing in the care of American consular staff.

Yet, for all his detestation of the Guomindang, Arkush maintains that the extent to which Fei was radicalised and the extent to which he embraced the Communists in the years running up to their victory in the Civil War is far from clear. The Communists themselves would find plenty of reason to distrust him and malign him as a ‘rightist’ from his writings in this period and after. Insofar as Fei speaks of the Communists at all during the Civil War years, he speaks of them with a kind of detached appreciation (in that they pursue reforms beneficial to the peasantry) mixed with apprehension about their ultimate accountability to the peasantry. Yet Fei does not flee abroad the way so many others of his cohort do, to Hong Kong, Taiwan, England or America: instead he stays put, for reasons which any good traditionalist conservative ought to appreciate.

I feel much better that I am going through the dark period with my people… I am glad that I decide to return home instead of run away to foreign countries. The sense of belonging and rooting which grows responsibility is essential to human life. It makes one’s life rich.

Fei would ultimately pay a heavy price for that choice. In the years immediately after the establishment of the People’s Republic, Fei fought an uphill battle to establish and defend the scholarly discipline of sociology, which as often as not (under Soviet influence) subject to fundamental critique on Marxist-Leninist grounds as a ‘bourgeois’ discipline. The documents Arkush cites from Fei usually take on a fairly optimistic and ebullient tone, but the biographer is clear that they were written in something of an adverse political atmosphere, and his work was as often as not regarded as subversive. He was put to work, ultimately, working with the ethnic Mongolians of the Chinese north and the Hmong and Zhuang peoples of Guizhou and Guangxi in the Chinese southwest. During this time he ventured some rather trenchant criticisms of Han chauvinism and uncomradely condescension toward the ‘brother nationalities’ on the Chinese frontiers.

When the Hundred Flowers Campaign opened up, Fei pressed home his advantage and fought to gain a place at the table for the objective study of social conditions within the country, even – at this time – returning to Kaixiangong for a follow-up study to his earlier Peasant Life in China to see how things had improved. He was clear that under the new government’s rule the peasants’ lives had improved materially, but that there was still more work to be done.

But the Hundred Flowers Campaign ended abruptly, as the Communist Party was inundated by internal criticism – much of it, in fact, from League members. In the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed, the League were among the first and foremost of the targets, and Fei Xiaotong, being a high-profile member of the League whose work appeared prominently in print, came in for early and harsh censure as an unreformed ‘bourgeois intellectual’ who had not sufficiently engaged in self-criticism or thought reform. Fei’s public humiliation was swift, sudden and harsh, and he was denounced by several people and former students he had thought of as close friends. Much of this denunciation was salacious, patently ridiculous, and motivated by malice and intent to humiliate rather than edify. Fei was accused of being a lackey of the landlords and an agent of American imperialism – both of which charges are easily falsifiable by a cursory examination of his work. But his treatment was not nearly as harsh as what later victims of the Cultural Revolution would have to endure. He lost his job and his reputation; he was lucky not to have lost his family and his life.

For the better part of twenty years, Fei was not allowed to return to academic work, and the social ostracism and abuse he endured during those years put an awful strain on Meng Yin and their children. The book does end on a hopeful note, though. In the wake of the trial of the Gang of Four Fei Xiaotong was largely exonerated and rehabilitated, and allowed to return to sociological work. He was particularly eager to return to the villages and the peoples he had studied as part of his national minorities work; and he was warmly received back by the Hmong and Zhuang communities he had studied, in no small part due to his advocacy on their behalf.

Getting back to my first paragraph, though. The reason I consider Fei Xiaotong to have a ‘saintly’ disposition lies precisely in the fact that, after the Gang of Four trial and the thaw in the intellectual climate brought by ‘reform and opening’, Fei Xiaotong did not avail himself of the opportunity to strike back at the people who had denounced and borne false witness against him, for the sake of pursuing revenge. No one came through those years with their hands clean, and it seems like Fei understood that perfectly well. If he was not as outspoken as he could have been about the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution, at least he also did not engage in recriminations or feuds with former friends, and for the last years of his life instead focussed on bolstering his own work and continuing to advocate both for sociology and for the peasantry.

Fei continues to be of scholarly interest to me as one of the ties (along with Wen Yiduo) between the strand of populist leftism in Russia represented by Kerensky (and Mother Maria, and Saint Bunakov, and Priestmartyr Valentin), and the strand of populist leftism in China represented by Liang Shuming. The ties in the present day between the thought of Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov and that of Dr Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 go far deeper than a mere mutual admiration for Immanuel Wallerstein. And those ties continue to have something to do with the interactions on the frontiers of both nations exemplified by the sociological work of Dr Fei Xiaotong and the political poetics of his comrade in Kunming.