In 1947, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong published a series of essays on rural society, collected in 1948 as Rural China (乡土中国). In them he named the pattern of Chinese social relations chaxu geju (差序格局), the differential mode of association.
“Our pattern,” he wrote, is like “the ripples that spread out in circles when a stone is thrown onto the water. Each person is the center of the circles pushed out by his own social influence.”