The Lineage and the Clan

Abstract

We have seen that despite the great weight which was placed on family relationships, the family was full of tensions. All the urging of the Confucian ethic could not prevent the group from breaking down constantly into small units which resembled the simple family much more than the undivided five-generation extended family. Almost always the personality clashes within the family proved stronger than the forces for unity which were founded in a dispassionate sense of duty. The ideal continued to be believed in, but few could realise it: and the Chinese seem to have been no less blind to the actual scarcity of extended families than were those Westerners who reported them as though they were the norm in Chinese society.