1950s and 1960s: Politics in command 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. He was made vice president in 1951 of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Beijing (today,
Minzu University of China), and in 1954 attended the First National People's Congress as a member of the Nationalities Affairs Commission. His 'second life' was more than ever that of the public intellectual, with important political posts and contact with policy makers. 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. Virtually every week in the 1990s his name was in the newspapers and his face on television. 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. 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. A representative example of his work is Fei's 1988
Tanner lecture in Hong Kong, "Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese Nationality." According to Fei, the
Huaxia became a true ethnic group, the
Han, during the
Qin dynasty. 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.
The 1990s and 2000s: reminiscence and caution Above all, it was as a writer that Fei flourished in his 'second life'. Virtually all of his old books were republished during these years, and he turned out new books and articles in even greater quantity. Of the fifteen volumes of his “Works” (1999–2001), new writings from the 1980s and 1990s fill over half. Many of the themes were familiar. He repeatedly and forcefully set forth the case for sociology and anthropology in China if modernization were to succeed. He reminisced about his village fieldwork, his studies, and his teachers. There were articles and books on rural industrialization, small towns, national minorities, and developing frontier areas. He championed the cause of intellectuals. He recounted what he had learned from his trips abroad and made some new translations from English. There was even a little book of his poetry. What is different in all this new writing is political caution; Fei had too much to do and too little time in the last decades to risk playing with fire again. He was Professor of Sociology at
Peking University at the time of his death on April 24, 2005, in Beijing at the age of 94. A memorial has been set up in the Department of
Sociology at the university, where he has taught and directed since the 1980s. ==Career landmarks==