1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Hong Kong Macau Republic of China (Taiwan)(groups of pro-Chinese identity) Hong Kong Republic of China (Taiwan)(groups of pro-Chinese identity) Current Former Fei Xiaotong or Fei Hsiao-tung (November 2, 1910 – April 24, 2005) was a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist.

His father, Fei Pu'an (费朴安) was educated in the Chinese classics, earned a shengyuan civil service degree, studied in Japan, and founded a middle school.

in anthropology, Fei went to nearby Tsinghua University where he studied with Pan Guangdan and learned fieldwork methods from a White Russian, S. M. Shirokogoroff.

[citation needed] An important work of the period, China's Gentry, was compiled from Fei's field interviews, and was published in the United States in 1953.

[1]: 18 After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Fei played an important role in national intellectual and ideological life, and before long he began to hold a growing number of political positions.

But then the climate suddenly changed with the “Anti-Rightist Movement.” In 1957, Fei stood with head bowed before countless assemblies to confess his “crimes toward the people.” [4] Hundreds of articles attacked him, not a few by colleagues, some viciously dishonest.

[4] In the 1970s, Fei, internationally known, began to receive foreign visitors, and after Mao's death he was asked to direct the restoration of Chinese sociology.

His influence is thought to have been important in convincing the government to promote rural industry, whose rapid growth in the 1980s raised the income of hundreds of millions of villagers all over China.

He traveled all over China, went abroad, to the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere, and was showered with international honors: the Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, an honorary doctorate from the University of Hong Kong, and other honors in Japan, the Philippines, Canada.

He played a role in promoting and directing the reestablishment of sociology and anthropology in China, training scholars and developing teaching materials after thirty years of prohibition.

[citation needed] Fei is also known for his influential theory on ethnic groups in Chinese history, which follows the tradition of Lewis H. Morgan's stage-developmental evolutionism.

Afterwards, the Han became "a nucleus with centripetal force" with their stable agricultural society attracting and assimilating ethnic nomads from China's northern frontier such as the Qiang.