Professor Elisabeth Croll, the anthropologist, who has died aged 63, carried out important research which brought new insights into the role of women and the development of the family in the People's Republic of China.
In recent decades, feminist opinion about Communist China has tended to lurch between extremes. In the 1970s many western women were favourably impressed by the high priority being given to the redefinition of sex roles by the Communist regime. But then, with the broadcast of harrowing documentaries about "dying rooms" in Chinese orphanages where unwanted female babies were left to starve, and stories of patriarchal repression from Jung Chang's White Swans, disillusion set in.
Though she herself was a feminist and sympathised with many of the social aims of the Chinese regime, Elisabeth Croll always took a more nuanced view of what was happening in China. She was the first anthropologist to penetrate remote rural villages in inland China at a time when the political situation made access difficult, and her academic training enabled her to evaluate the practical implications of government policy on marriage and the family with a degree of detachment.
Thus, while she understood the need to have smaller families and saw the advantages in that for women, she disliked the methods — forced abortion and sterilisation — used by the Chinese government to enforce their one-child policy. In later life she became involved in campaigns to publicise the plight of unwanted daughters and missing girls in China and Asia.
At the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), where she was Professor of Chinese Anthropology from 1995, Elisabeth Croll started one of the first anthropology of development courses in the country and lobbied hard to add a social dimension to the discipline. She was founder chairman of the Centre for Chinese Studies and head of the Department of Development Studies, and in 2002 was appointed vice-principal of Soas with special responsibility for external relations.
She was also active as a consultant on poverty, health, food, education and women's rights, working for UN agencies, development bodies and the British and Chinese governments.
In her first book, Feminism and Socialism in China (1978), Elisabeth Croll explored a women's movement which had begun in the 19th century and detected a mismatch between state policies to promote sexual equality and the highly resilient patriarchal traditions of rural China. Her other books included The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China (1981); The Family Rice Bowl: Food in the Domestic Economy in China (1983); Chinese Women Since Mao (1984); China's One-Child Family Policy (1985); Women and Rural Development in China (1985); From Heaven to Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in China (1993) and Endangered Daughters (2000).
In her last book China's New Consumers: Social Development and Domestic Demand, published last year, she pointed out that, despite the publicity about China's booming economy, most Chinese are still desperately poor and that, partly due to its one-child policy, China was likely to become the first country to "get old before it gets rich".
The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was born Elisabeth Joan Sprackett at Reefton in the South Island of New Zealand on September 21 1944. Educated at a school in Christchurch, she took a degree in History at the University of Canterbury. In 1966 she married Jim Croll and travelled with him to London, where he had been appointed to a research post in civil engineering at London University.
They had two children but the marriage was later dissolved.She continued to study at Soas, gaining a master's degree in Far Eastern Studies, then a doctorate in the anthropology of China in 1977.
Before finding a permanent position at the school, she juggled her responsibilities as a mother of two children with visits to China and a number of short-term research fellowships — at the Contemporary China Institute and the Department of Anthropology at Soas; the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; Oxford University's Department of International Development; Princeton University; and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. In 1990 she was appointed lecturer in Anthropology at Soas, where she rose rapidly to Professor in 1995.
Elisabeth Croll was an executive member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs, vice-chairman of the Great Britain China Centre and a member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences.
A woman of wide interests, she was proficient in embroidery, knitting and needlework, and enjoyed evenings at the opera and weekends spent in her seaside caravan at Hayling Island.
This year she was appointed CMG, but died on October 3 before she could be invested with the insignia by the Queen. Her daughter received it on her behalf on October 10.
Her daughter and a son survive her.