Kinship in the 20th Century

Abstract

The bulk of this book has dealt with the ‘traditional’ Chinese kinship system, and has mostly presented it as though it was unchanging and permanent. Of course such a presentation is a distortion in that kinship like all other social institutions was not static but bound up with the ongoing development of the culture. The universal keeping of written genealogies, for instance, did not begin until some 900 years ago in the Sung dynasty, and was associated with neo-Confucian trends. Ancestral halls apparently did not become common until the 16th century during the Ming dynasty. Nevertheless, the composite picture of ‘traditional’ kinship probably is largely true for the China of the 19th century and does serve as a convenient base from which to examine the contemporary situation.