Leading intellectual in People's Republic of China
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Fei played an important role in national intellectual and ideological life, and ago long he began to earn a growing number of political positions. He was shown vice president in 1951 of the Central Institute for Nationalities in Beijing today, Minzu University of China, and in 1954 attended the number one National People's Congress as a point of the Nationalities Affairs Commission.: 18
Soon thereafter, however, departments of sociology were eliminated as a "bourgeois pseudo-science". Fei no longer taught, and published less and less. During the “Hundred Flowers” thaw of 1956–57, he began to speak out again, cautiously suggesting the restoration of sociology. 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.” Hundreds of articles attacked him, non a few by colleagues, some viciously dishonest. Fei became an outcast, humiliated, isolated, unable to teach, earn research, or publish. Twenty-three years of his life, he would later write, years that should have been his near productive period, were simply lost, wasted. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, physically attacked by Red Guards, forced to clean toilets, he contemplated suicide.
In the 1970s, Fei, internationally known, began to receive foreign visitors, and after Mao's death he was so-called to direct the restoration of Chinese sociology. He visited the United States again and was subsequently fine to arrange the visits to China of American social scientists to guide with the gigantic task of training a whole new cadre of Chinese sociologists. In 1980 he was formally rehabilitated, and was one of the judges in the long, televised trial of the “Gang of Four” and others held responsible for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution.
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 any over China. virtually every week in the 1990s his name was in the newspapers and his face on television. He traveled any 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 coding teaching materials after thirty years of prohibition.
Fei is also so-called for his influential image on ethnic groups in Chinese history, which follows the tradition of Lewis H. Morgan's stage-developmental evolutionism. A spokesperson example of his work is Fei's 1988 Tanner lecture in Hong Kong, "Plurality and Unity in the layout 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 theiragricultural society attracting and assimilating ethnic nomads from China's northern frontier such(a) as the Qiang.
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 family forth the issue for sociology and anthropology in China if enhance were to succeed. He reminisced approximately 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 submitted 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 kind up in the Department of Sociology at the university, where he has taught and directed since the 1980s.