Market Town, Diffused Religion, and Industrial Metropolis : C.K. Yang As a Chinese Social Theorist

C.K. Yang (Yang Qingkun) is a well-known albeit under-studied figure in Chinese sociology . While Yang’s pivotal role in institution building, particularly the reestablishment of Chinese sociology in the 1980s, is duly recognized, his contributions to sociological theory are seldom scrutinized . This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing Yang’s major works and teasing out their broader theoretical implications . To start with, Yang was an early member of the “Yenching School” of Chinese sociology . Like his classmate Fei Xiaotong, Yang was exposed to the influence of Robert Park when the latter visited Yenching University in 1932 . While Fei soon turned to functional anthropology in framing his rural studies, Yang adapted Park’s human ecology to the study of a Chinese market town . Yang’s groundbreaking study inspires subsequent works on the spatial and social structure of Chinese society . On top of this, Yang had been developing a peculiar brand of institutional and functional analysis in the 1960s . While Talcott Parsons was his major point of reference, Yang did not uncritically follow structural-functionalism in conceptualizing the characteristics of Chinese society . In his celebrated study of Chinese religion, Yang adopted Parsons’ notion of “diffuseness” in demonstrating that religious beliefs and practices permeated various arenas of Chinese society rather than coalescing into a symbolic-institutional center a la the Christian Church . But Yang was able to arrive at this conclusion only by supplementing structural functional analysis with the Yenching tradition of community studies . One can also find the elements of an institutional theory of culture and social change in Yang’s works . While such a theory remained implicit, it furnished the analytical framework of a landmark study of Hong Kong as an industrial metropolis in the 1970s . By putting Yang’s ideas in shifting contexts, this paper represents a modest step in reappraising his legacies in Chinese social theory