CHINA STUDIESgave approval for the ‘‘rehabilitation’’ of sociolo-
gy. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and
given the authority crisis that followed in the wake
of the Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao leader-
ship reopened many issues. China faced a number
of serious social problems that had been ignored
previously, and in this situation long-standing ar-
guments about the utility of sociology for the study
of social problems could be raised once again.
The second major change that occurred in
1979 was the ‘‘normalization’’ of diplomatic rela-
tions between the United States and China. That
development led to approval for American and
other Western researchers to conduct extended
field research in China for the first time since
- The days of frustrating confinement to re-
search from outside and academic tourism were
over. It also became possible for U.S. sociologists
to meet Chinese counterparts and to begin to
discuss common research interests and plans for
collaboration. Westerners began coming to China
to teach sociology courses, Chinese began to be
sent abroad for training in sociology, and collabo-
rative conferences and publications were initiated.
Leading figures in the West, including Peter Blau,
Alex Inkeles, Nan Lin, W. J. Goode, Hubert Blalock,
and Jeffrey Alexander, lectured in China and re-
cruited Chinese courterparts for collaborative re-
search and for training in their home institutions.
All of the kinds of intellectual interchange be-
tween Chinese sociologists and their foreign coun-
terparts that had been impossible for a generation
were resumed.
The dangerous political aura surrounding so-
ciology in the Mao era and the lesson of the
abortive 1957 attempt to revive the field might
have been expected to make it difficult to attract
talented people to Chinese sociology after 1979.
However, the field revived very rapidly and showed
surprising intellectual vigor. A number of surviv-
ing pre-1949 sociologists reappeared to play lead-
ing roles in the revival, considerable numbers of
middle-aged individuals trained in related fields
were recruited (or ordered) to become sociolo-
gists, and many young people expressed eagerness
to be selected for training in the field. The Chinese
Sociological Association was formally revived, with
Fei Xiaotong as its head. (Fei ‘‘unrenounced’’ his
pre-1949 works, weakened his ties with ethnology,
and resumed advocacy of the program of Chinese
rural development he had championed a genera-
tion earlier.) A number of departments of sociolo-
gy were established in leading universities, and
new sociological journals and a large number of
monographs and textbooks began to appear. Insti-
tutes of sociology were established within the Chi-
nese Academy of Social Science in Peking as well
as in many provincial and city academies. Appar-
ently, the novelty of the field, the chance to make a
place for oneself, and perhaps even the chance to
study abroad without having to face competition
from layers of senior people more than compen-
sated for the checkered political past of sociology.
In any case, the speed and vigor with which the
field revived surprised the skeptics (see Whyte and
Pasternak 1980).The intellectual focus of the revived sociology
was fairly broad. Social problems and the sociolo-
gy of development were two major foci. Within
these and other realms, two sets of issues loomed
large. One was the study of the after-effects of the
Cultural Revolution and the radical policies pur-
sued under Mao Zedong in the period 1966 to- The other major issue concerned the impact
of the opening to the outside world, decollectivization
of agriculture, and the market-oriented reforms
launched in 1978. A large number of studies began
on these and other issues, and by the end of the
1980s the problem facing foreign sociologists study-
ing China was not so much the scarcity of data on
their object of study but its abundance. The publi-
cation of large amounts of statistical material, the
availability of census and survey data dealing with
demographic and other matters, and the mush-
rooming of social science publications threatened
to overwhelm those who tried to keep track of
Chinese social trends.
In pursuing their new intellectual agendas,
Chinese sociologists easily found common ground
with Western specialists. The latter were no longer
so entranced with the Maoist model and shared a
fascination with the social impact of the post-Mao
changes. Many Western specialists readily adapted
to the chance to conduct research in China and to
collaborate with Chinese colleagues. Hong Kong
did not die out as a research site and remained
vital for some topics, but work from outside China
was increasingly seen as supplementary to research
conducted within the country. (After 1997 and
Hong Kong’s reversion to China this was still the