In many ways, Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) was the embodiment of Chinese sociology and its development in the twentieth century. Fei was among the first batch of Chinese students receiving a more systematic local training in sociology, thanks to the incipient growth and institutionalization of the discipline from the 1920s onward. He was graduated from the Yanjing University , a renowned American-run liberal arts college that was the center of sociological research in China prior to 1949 . Upon return from his overseas studies in Britain, Fei’s works on rural China soon attained international fame and became the landmark of the “Chinese school” of sociology. But after 1949, Fei’s fortune underwent an abrupt reversal as “bourgeois sociology” constituted the target of ideological attacks that culminated in the Cultural Revolution . After almost three decades of total suspension, sociology’s potential value for economic reform and socialist modernization was for the first time recognized by the socialist state. Sociology was thus reestablished and Fei’s academic status restored, as he served as the leading representative of the discipline in countless committees and delegations. This also marked the beginning of a new and unprecedented level of policy and social intervention on the part of Chinese sociologists: Fei himself was appointed as the chief advisor of small town studies and development. Throughout his life, Fei personified not only the ebb and flow of Chinese sociology, but also its “problem consciousness ,” that is, a practical emphasis on the use of sociological knowledge for the effective solution of social problems. In Fei’s own words, Chinese sociology was distinguished (and legitimized) by its “realism in the pursuit of knowledge” (congshi qiuzhi).
Toward the end of his life, however, Fei showed a keen interest in the fiction The Celestine Prophecy, a 1993 national bestseller by the American novelist James Redfield translated into Chinese in 1997. Having read the novel twice, Fei gave an account of his fascination during an interview in 2003. Generally unimpressed by literary works, his attention was nevertheless caught by the author’s name, James Redfield. Fei thought he was the grandson of Robert Park , the American sociologist who in the early 1930s visited the Yanjing University and taught Fei about the importance of the direct observations of social life. Margaret Park Redfield, putatively the novelist’s mother, was the editor of the English translation of Fei’s Earthbound China and China’s Gentry, when Fei first visited the USA in the early 1950s. Fei believed that he met little Redfield and his parents during their visits in Tsinghua University and Yanjing University in the same period. Though James Redfield later became a classics professor at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago , Fei’s hunch was that he could be the author of the novel. But the sister of James the classicist later clarified to Fei that he was mistaken (Fei 2003: 64–65).
Another reason for Fei’s interest in the novel resided in its popularity in the USA, which seemed to confirm his emphasis on “cultural self-awareness” at the final stage of his academic career. The Celestine Prophecy, according to Fei, was an attempt on the part of the Western people to come to terms with their own culture and its problems such as secularism, materialism, and the unrestrained exploitation of earth resources. Fei was particularly drawn to its prophecies regarding the coming crisis and great awakening of the world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though remaining within the Christian framework of brotherly love, the novel proposed that birth control, automation, and communism could be some possible ways to redeem the humankind. These directions, Fei believed, concurred with the current policies and developments of China (Fei 2003: 64–67).
For Fei, therefore, The Celestine Prophecy was interesting because it was not a novel in the conventional sense; in Fei’s reading, it was a self-conscious reflection on Western culture by an author deeply familiar with the course of Western history. The novel was in fact an anthropological essay in literary guise (Fei 2003: 68). One might wonder if Fei was again fundamentally mistaken, this time about the novel’s genre. In the eyes of the Western readers, The Celestine Prophecy was composed in the spirit of Eastern mysticism underlying the New Age movement. Fei was not altogether unaware of the mystic element in the work, as he was at the time reflecting upon what Chen Yinke, a renowned Chinese historian, once called “ecstasy and contemplation” (shenyou mingxiang) in prefacing a great intellectual piece. But Fei understood it not so much as a flowing state than a capacity to see through the appearance to perceive the essential truth. According to Fei, his conclusion was inspired by Robert Park’s dissatisfaction with Franklin Giddings’ behavioral approach to sociology (ibid.: 61–62). An exotic but somewhat common experience for the Chinese humanities scholars was inadvertently reinterpreted from the rational-critical perspective of American sociology.
Despite (or rather because of) Fei’s misreading of the novel, this anecdote served to reveal the rich fabric of Sino-American intellectual exchanges in the twentieth century and the enduring problem of the cross-cultural diffusion of ideas and knowledge. It was startling to recognize that Fei’s encounter with Robert Park was so profound, both personally and academically, that it could not fail to channel his interest toward “literary” work in the last years of his life. But the formative experience of American and more broadly Western sociology did not imply forgetfulness on Chinese culture and identity. Imported ideas were assimilated, consciously or not, to the bedrock of Chinese experiences in technological, economic, social, political, and cultural development. But the converse was also true: the rational-critical ethos of Western sociology was no less significant than the practical thrust of the Chinese intellectual tradition in shaping Fei’s orientation and worldview. And yet the two-way traffic was never smooth and straightforward, as the diffusion and adaptation of sociological knowledge and its background assumptions were full of misunderstandings, be they creative or not.
This study aims to chart the history in which globally circulated sociological knowledge is adapted to China’s peculiar and ever shifting intellectual-political context from the late nineteenth century to the present. Ever since the inception of Chinese sociology, the problem of indigenization or “sinicization” of Western intellectual frameworks has constituted a core concern of Chinese scholars. Various attempts have been made to assimilate the tenets of Western (in particular American) sociology while retaining a Chinese intellectual identity. Instead of a simple and direct transmission of knowledge, the making of Chinese sociology as an academic discipline involved the selection and synthesis of particular concepts, theories, and methods. How successive generations of Chinese sociologists explored different models of sociological knowledge, what choices they made, and the diverse strategies on which they embarked to promote disciplinary growth, warrants an extended and analytical treatment. On the basis of a detailed historical investigation, this study seeks to contribute to a cross-cultural optic on the emergence and fate of sociological traditions. The histories of American, British, French, and German sociology have already been amply scrutinized; more recently, those experiences have been complemented by fine studies of less known yet vibrant traditions in countries such as Australia, Portugal, and South Africa (Harley and Wickham 2014; Silva 2016; Sooryamoorthy 2016). A comparable history of the Chinese case is timely. It promises to enlarge this growing body of comparative literature and offer new insights into how sociological traditions of the West were and are appropriated in the making of non-Western sociology.
While focusing on a non-Western case, this study augments the institutional approach characteristic of historical accounts of Western sociology. According to my understanding, to follow the institutional approach is to treat sociological knowledge as the historical product of intellectual communities, which are shaped by the state, universities, research institutes, professional associations, and other agencies of higher education. Studies in the broad tradition of sociology of knowledge , inaugurated by Karl Mannheim (1936) and developed by Robert Merton (1970), have sought to illuminate the relationship between structural conditions and intellectual outcomes. Exemplary works in this tradition include Randall Collins’ (1998) account of the rise and fall of philosophical systems in terms of the intellectual competition for limited attention space, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) analysis of the French academic field and the struggle for symbolic power therein, and Charles Camic’s (1986, 1989) historical essays on the cognitive and social processes in the formation of American social sciences. Recently, Camic et al. (2011) employ the sociology of knowledge in dialogue with the burgeoning field of science studies. The latter’s emphasis on the role of scientific practice (Latour 1986; Barnes et al. 1996) can be readily extended from the realm of natural science and technology to social scientific knowledge (MacKenzie et al. 2008). Despite the variety of concepts and approaches, a primary aim of the sociology of knowledge is to inquire how the production of knowledge is shaped by social and existential conditions (Merton 1945). This study focuses on the institutional factors.
Stimulated by these works, this study will examine the development of Chinese sociology by highlighting the historical and institutional factors shaping its course. More analytically, I will chart the material, symbolic and organizational resources, in...