In 2007, friends and colleagues published a festschrift in his memory, Social Change in Contemporary China: C. K. Yang and the Concept of Institutional Diffusion.
[1] Born in 1911 in Canton, where his father owned both a wholesale fish market and land in the countryside, Yang was tutored at home in the Confucian classics.
Over his father's objections, Yang decided to end his home tutoring and enter Yenching University, where he shared a room with Fei Xiaotong, who was to become China's leading anthropologist.
[4] In 1951 Yang took his family to live in the United States, where he was research associate at the MIT Center for International Studies in 1951 and at Harvard in 1952.
Yang argued that although it was not embodied in institutions such as churches, religion was nonetheless an important diffuse force in Chinese society.
[7][8] During the 1960s, Yang began to use leaves of absence for a series of extended visits to universities in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia to strengthen their instruction in sociology.