The Traditional Chinese Family & Lineage

[NZBC]

weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbfamilism-u.html

Arguably there has never been a stable human society in which any institution has been more important to the participants than the family. Thus China is by no means unique in considering the family important, and scholars of Chinese life are well served by focusing attention upon it.

The strong institutionalization of the family in traditional China would seem to have made familism even more central in that society than in most.

It is not possible to do justice to the complexity and diversity of this institution on a simple web page, but this page attempts at least to provide a few coordinating principles and define a few terms. (Given the state of college teaching about Chinese society, this web site is probably the only place you will ever have the Chinese terms revealed to you if you happen to be studying Chinese. Copy them now!)

Because this page is devoted to the traditional Chinese family system, I have tended to use the past tense. Many of the institutions, beliefs, and values discussed here are still present in China, but I have preferred to focus on the past in order to stress traditionalism and to avoid dealing with the complexities of the effects on the system of the modern growth of industries, urban populations, and foreign influences, especially foreign influences on law.

When the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies differ, the simplified characters are printed in red and the traditional equivalents in blue. When they are identical, black is used.

Outline
The Family
The Lineage
People Not in Families
Marriage
Sexuality
Adoption & Other Fictive Kinship

[NZBC]

The prime collective activity of a lineage was ancestor worship, and whatever else it did, it always did this. Many a lineage would maintain a modest (or occasionally pretentious) "hall" (t¨¢ng ÌÃ) for this purpose, usually with provision for the permanent storage of ancestral tablets. The commonest procedure was for members to move tablets from family altars to the lineage hall as the tablets got older. In some regions there was a general rule about this ¡ªtablets over five generations old would be moved, for example. In other regions tablets would be moved in whenever the hall was rehabilitated. In some cases members who wanted to put tablets in the hall would pay for the privilege, the income going to the maintenance of the hall.

[NZBC]

Concubinage. Until well into the XXth century, Chinese society regarded it as a normal thing for a man to take more than one wife, especially if the first wife did not produce male offspring, and so long as the family budget could afford the additional person. However there was always a distinction between the first wife or q¨© ÆÞ (colloquial f¨´q¨© ¸¾ÆÞ [‹DÆÞ]) and a secondary wife (concubine), who might be called by a variety of terms, usually involving the syllable qi¨¨ æª. (In modern Chinese a wife is normally referred to as a t¨¤it¨¤i Ì«Ì«, while a concubine is referred to as a "little t¨¤it¨¤i" С̫̫.) In some far western regions under Tibetan influence, a woman could have more than one husband, but for "mainstream" Chinese society that was not possible.