CHINA STUDIES‘‘nonprimitive’’ communities—Chinese peasant vil-
lages (see Fei 1939; Yang 1944; Lin 1948).
Although many of the earliest leaders in estab-
lishing Chinese sociology were foreigners, by the
time of the Chinese communist victory in 1949, its
leading practitioners were Chinese. There were
only a small number of Western sociologists who
concentrated their research on Chinese society
(see Lang 1946; Levy 1949), and their methods,
problems, and data were not distinctive from those
being employed by their Chinese counterparts.
Originally a foreign transplant, Chinese sociology
had become a thriving enterprise with increasingly
strong domestic roots.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
swept to national power in 1949, some Chinese
sociologists left the country but most remained.
(The development of sociology in the Republic of
China on Taiwan after 1949 will not be dealt with
here.) Initially, those who remained were optimis-
tic that their skills would be useful to the new
government. Experience in community fieldwork
and an orientation toward studying social prob-
lems seemed to make Chinese sociologists natural
allies of those constructing a planned social order.
These hopes were dashed in 1952 when the CCP
abolished the field of sociology. That decision was
motivated by the CCP’s desire to follow the Soviet
model. Joseph Stalin had earlier denounced soci-
ology as a ‘‘bourgeois pseudo-science’’ and banned
the field from Soviet academe. More to the point,
there was no room in the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) for two rival sciences of society,
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and sociology. The CCP
argued that it had developed its own methods of
‘‘social investigations’’ during the revolutionary
process, with Mao Zedong playing a leading role in
this development (see Mao [1927] 1971; Thomp-
son 1990). This approach stressed grass roots in-
vestigations designed to further official revolu-
tionary or economic goals of the CCP rather than
any sort of attempted value-free search for objec-
tive truth. Chinese sociologists, trained in a differ-
ent tradition and able to use professional claims to
raise questions about CCP policies, were seen as a
threat to the ideological hegemony of the new regime.
The ban on sociology in China was to last
twenty-seven years, until 1979. One major attempt
was made by Chinese sociologists in 1956 and
1957 to get the ban lifted. In the more relaxed
political atmosphere prevailing at that time, ush-
ered in by the CCP’s slogan ‘‘let 100 flowers bloom
and 100 schools of thought contend’’ and encour-
aged by the revival of sociology in the Soviet
Union, leading figures such as Fei Xiaotong, Pan
Guangdan, Wu Jingchao, and Chen Da wrote arti-
cles and made speeches arguing that sociology
could be useful to socialist China in the study of
social change and social problems— precisely the
same rationale used prior to 1952. When the
political atmosphere turned harsh again in the
latter part of 1957, with the launching of the ‘‘anti-
rightist campaign,’’ Fei and many of the other
leaders of this revival effort were branded ‘‘rightist
elements’’ and disappeared from view.From 1952 to 1979 some of those trained in
sociology were assigned to work that had some
links to their abolished field. Throughout this
period ethnology remained an established disci-
pline, devoted to the study of China’s various
ethnic minorities. When Fei Xiaotong emerged
from his political purgatory in 1972, it was as a
leading figure in ethnology. But Fei and others
could not do research on the 94 percent of the
population that is Han Chinese, and they also had
to renounce publicly all their former work and
ideas as ‘‘bourgeois.’’ Psychology survived better
than sociology by becoming defined as a natural,
rather than a social, science. Some areas of social
psychology (for example, educational psychology)
remained at least somewhat active through the
1960s and 1970s (see Chin and Chin 1969). Other
components of sociology disappeared in 1952 but
reappeared prior to 1979. Demography was estab-
lished as a separate field in the early 1970s and
remains a separate discipline in Chinese academe
today. With these partial exceptions, however,
Chinese sociology ceased to exist for these twenty-
seven years.While sociology was banned in China, the
sociological study of that society developed gradu-
ally in the West. Starting in the late 1950s, Ameri-
can foundations and government agencies, and to
some extent their European and Japanese coun-
terparts, provided funds for the development of
the study of contemporary China—for fellowships,
research centers, journals, language training facili-
ties, and other basic infrastructure for the field.
Within this developmental effort, sociology was