Fei Xiaotong
Born in 1911 in Canton, where his father owned both a wholesale fish market and land in the countryside, Yang was tutored at home in the Confucian classics. Over his father’s objections, Yang decided to end his home tutoring and enter Yenching University, where he shared a room with Fei Xiaotong, who was to become China's leading anthropologist. The American sociologist Robert E. Park spent the year 1931 at Yenching, strengthening Yang's ambition to become a sociologist himself. Yang, Fei, and Wu Wenzao translated a collection of Park's sociological essays published by the Yenching Department of Sociology in 1934. After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees from Yenching, Yang went to the United States and took his PhD in Sociology at University of Michigan in 1939.