The Family in China, Past and Present

Abstract

T HE WESTERN LITERATURE on which we draw for much of our knowledge of the family in China' is full of variations on the theme that the family was the basic unit of Chinese society. In one sense the statement must certainly be true. In any society the family is the group which produces the personnel to man the wider institutions; and in the process of generating social beings it impresses on them certain principles of conduct which have a bearing on the way in which they discharge their general tasks. The family is therefore basic. But this is not significantly truer of China than of most other societies, and what people usually appear to mean when they assert that the family was the basic unit of Chinese society is one of two things: either that the family provided the model for the society as a whole, such that even the total polity might be regarded as one massive family, or that family relationships predominated in their potency over all other kinds of relationship. There are both naive and sophisticated versions of these views. A simpleminded account of China treats the emperor as the patriarch of a blown-up family formed by the empire as a whole. On this view it is possible to ascribe to the Chinese polity a benign authoritarianism exercised over a mass of patient and pious children by a stern yet considerate father. In more technical discussions the dominance of Chinese society by the family is expressed by assigning to it a strength which inhibits men in their dealings-say, their economic transactions-with members of other families. Behind the confusion lies a failure, in the first place, to distinguish between family as a specific social group on the one hand and kinship on the other. We can show without much difficulty that kinship bound together large numbers of people in Chinese society and exerted an important effect on their political, economic, and religious conduct at large. Family is another matter. Essentially, its realm is that of domestic life, a realm of co-residence and the constant involvement in affairs of the hearth, children, and marriage. Kinship is something different. Outside his family a Chinese was bound by rights and duties to people related to him through ties of descent and marriage. The relationships traced exclusively through males, as a special set of kinship relations, might be so extensive and organized as to form patrilineal