China: what we think we know is wrong

The father of modern Chinese sociology is Fei Xiaotong, who was trained at the London School of Economics. Fei's book Xiangtu Zhongguo (From the Soil: Foundations of Chinese Society) published in 1947 - two years before the Communist Party (CPC) came to power - contains the most famous elaboration of his core idea, that relationships in China are based on a model of elasticity, with each individual at the centre of a world of connections. There have been immense changes in China in the subsequent sixty-six years, yet Fei's portrait of how China works at the level of intimate and interpersonal links is still highly relevant.This is most evident among the top echelons of political power in the People's Republic o...