A Theory from the Soil: Fei Xiaotong‘s Chaxu Geju, Assemblage, and the Geopolitics of Theory-Making

Yuri Yu, Princeton University

Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong's chaxu geju ("differential mode of association"), the central concept of his 1947 canonical Xiangtu Zhongguo (From the Soil), has been received as a foundational description of Chinese social organization, relegated to ethnographic data to be explained by Euro-American theory rather than a theoretical apparatus in its own right. This paper argues that chaxu geju constitutes a portable social ontology capable of diagnosing network logics beyond China. Reconstructing chaxu geju as a theory of social topology characterized by ego-generative structure, graduated relational intensity, and distributed maintenance through ritualized affect, the paper places Fei in conversation with Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory. This cross-reading, which reveals structural convergences between Fei's 1947 framework and DeLanda’s assemblage theory, demonstrates that Fei articulated a sophisticated network ontology decades before its Euro-American counterparts. Moreover, Fei's framework extends DeLanda's formalization, particularly through its ego-relative phenomenology of network structure and its theorization of affect—grounded in a shared but overlooked Jamesian genealogy with Brian Massumi—as a generative condition of social formation rather than merely an expressive component. Conversely, reading Fei through DeLanda's phase-transition logic dissolves Fei’s rhetorical East-West binarism that scholars of Fei have tended to take for granted, revealing that his seemingly China-specific typology holds theoretical force beyond its original context. The paper concludes by turning from theoretical reconstruction to the politics of knowledge production, arguing that chaxu geju's confinement to empirical area studies reflects not theoretical deficiency but the structural asymmetries that systematically relegate non-Western frameworks to local description. By deriving portable theoretical insight from a Chinese phenomenon rather than from the metropolitan centers that conventionally claim the privilege of abstraction, this intervention contributes to decentering modernity as an epistemic regime, demonstrating that rigorous social ontology can emerge from crisis-driven, practically oriented scholarship.

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 Presented in Session 64. Theorizing and Morality in Historical Social Science II: Time, Space, and Process