The distinguished Sinologist Professor Elisabeth Croll was a pioneering anthropologist who broke fresh ground with her innovative fieldwork examining the role of women, the family and rural life in post-Mao China.

The first anthropologist to penetrate obscure rural villages in the depths of China at a time when political reasons made outsiders' access to the country problematic, Croll won the trust of the Chinese, thus laying the groundwork for other Western anthropologists to follow, occasionally with mixed success. In later life the Chinese Government's Academy of Social Sciences consulted Croll on development policy.

On intense two-week missions, Croll would travel for research into the depths of rural China, enduring such hardships as sharing a heated brick bed with an entire peasant family, or having to go to the lavatory in or above a pigsty. A degree in history helped Croll to interpret social developments in post-Mao China in an historical context, while her anthropology training gave her a fresh perspective on the practical implications of state policy on marriage and the family.

Croll's first book, Feminism and Socialism in China (1978), was a pioneering study exploring the Chinese women's movement, since its origins in the 19th century. Women remained a particular concern, and Croll had ambiguous feelings towards the State's one-child policy, appreciating the practical needs for small families but disliking the forced abortion and sterilisation methods used to enforce it.

She detected a clash too between state promotion of sexual equality in marriage and free choice and the traditional structures of the rural Chinese household. Her books, each of which contained fresh, innovative insights included 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) and From Heaven to Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in China (1993). The Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen hailed Endangered Daughters, Croll's study of discrimination against women across Asia at a time when their economic power was rising, as “quite excellent” and “wonderfully engaging”.

Always unafraid to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, Croll's last book, China's New Consumers: Social Development and Domestic Demand (2006), argued that rather than representing a vast, unexploited market, most Chinese people were still desperately poor.

Croll was also in demand as an international policy adviser on topics including poverty relief, development and women and children's rights.

A valued member of the British Government's China Task Force, she was also chair of the United Nations University Council in Tokyo and a consultant on many UN bodies, as well as the World Bank, the Ford Foundation and the International Labour Organisation, producing valuable consultancy papers. As deputy chair of the executive committee of the Great Britain-China Centre, she provided support, guidance and a great deal of political savvy.

This year she was appointed CMG for services to higher education, especially in “promoting understanding of China's social development”. She was due to be invested with the insignia by the Queen on October 10. Her daughter attended on her behalf.

Elisabeth “Lisa” Joan Croll was born Lisa Sprackett in Reefton, on the South Island of New Zealand, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife. While her mother came from a long line of comfortably-off academics, her father was from a poor, deeply conscientious background. Her parents instilled inElisabeth a lifelong love of books and learning, along with a strong sense of duty, lack of ostentation and thrift. Her family had links with China from the early part of the 20th century and from the early 1960s her father worked with Chinese refugees, including a three-month stint in Hong Kong.

They moved to Sydney in 1962, but Croll was already reading history at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. When her husband, Jim (whom she married in 1966 and later divorced), was offered a research post in civil engineering at University College London, Croll accompanied him.

She gained her MA and PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the latter in anthropology of China. After holding several research fellowships at SOAS, the Institute of Development Studies, the University of Sussex, Queen Elizabeth House and Wolfson College, Oxford, and at Princeton, Elisabeth was appointed to a lectureship at SOAS in 1990, followed by senior lecturer and Reader posts and culminating in a chair in Chinese anthropology in 1995.

In 2002 she was made vice-principal of SOAS with particular responsibility for external relations and in the same period was elected chair of the UN council in Tokyo.

Through her work she made extensive and close contacts with Chinese scholars, many of whom are now extremely influential in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China's top universities.

She was much in demand as a lecturer, though in a world characterised by slick Powerpoint presentations, Croll stood out by relying on handwritten, scruffy lecture notes, which proved a rich mine of information as she talked at breakneck speed so as to maximise the time allotted her.

She was expert at embroidery, knitting and needlework, and loved nothing better than to find a garment in Oxfam and refashion it to wear to a black-tie occasion. Her sole indulgence was the odd trip to either the English National Opera or the Royal Opera House. Her haven was a caravan at Hayling Island, where the sea and sky reminded her of New Zealand.

She is survived by a son and a daughter.

Professor Elisabeth Croll, CMG, Sinologist, was born on September 21, 1944. She died of cancer on October 3, 2007, aged 63