Abstract: The rural construction movement in the first half of the 20th century is not only a movement for reconstructing society, but also a movement of knowledge production in modern Chinese society. In this movement, the paradigms of Yan Yangchu’s “creative adaptation” and Fei Xiaotong’s “seeking knowledge from reality” are both based on self cultural foundation and different interest in their research, supporting different ways of asserting and understanding Chinese society and, at the same time, proposing different possibilities for the dimensions of reconstructing Chinese society. As the academic heritage of Chinese sociology, these two paradigms of knowledge production provide important revelation for today’s construction of the knowledge system of Chinese sociology by their praxis logic and comparative analysis.