Lineage Organisation in South-Eastern China

Maurice Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367716974
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This essay is the work of a social anthropologist but it is not based upon field work. It is concerned with Chinese matters but it is not written by a sinologue. In this essay are the author's reflections on certain aspects of southeastern Chinese society during the last hundred and fifty years, with attention on the Fukien and Kwangtung region of China has it has specialized not only in large-scale unilineal organization but also in sending people overseas.

1 Village and Lineage in Fukien and Kwangtung

Nearly everywhere in China the more or less compact village formed a basic unit of rural society. The clan (as the lineage is often called in the literature) was usually but one section of a village. In the provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, however, the lineage and the village tended markedly to coincide, so that many villages consisted of single lineages. This coincidence of agnatic and local community was found in other parts of the country too, especially in the central provinces, but in the south-east it appears to have been most pronounced.¹

¹ Cf. Hu, op. cit,. pp. ii, 14.

With what this regional peculiarity is to be connected has never, so far as I am aware, been satisfactorily looked into. It is true that in Chinese terms the south-east is an area of fairly recent settlement by people of Chinese culture. This is why the inhabitants of Fukien and Kwangtung speak of themselves as Men of the T’ang rather than as Men of the Han dynasty.² Yet it is difficult to see exactly what factors may have led to the perpetuation of a wide scale lineage structure in this region when it has apparently tended to disintegrate or generally failed to emerge elsewhere. My wording here is deliberately cautious because I do not wish to associate myself with those who assume that at some time in the past all parts of China displayed the wide-ranging localized lineage which is now peculiar only to certain areas.³ If I draw attention to this important problem here only to pass over it quickly, I do so because I lack the competence to handle the historical material which might throw light on so interesting a social difference.⁴

² The Han dynasty spanned the beginning of the Christian era, while the T’ang reigned in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. On the use of the term ‘Man of T’ang’ see, e.g., J. Dyer Ball, The Chinese at Home or the Man of Tong and his Land, London, 1911, pp. xif.

3 Cf. K. A. Wittfogel, New Light on Chinese Society, An Investigation of China’s Socio-Economic Structure, New York, 1938, p. 9, and O. Lang, Chinese Family and Society, New Haven, 1946, p. 173.

⁴ I refer to this question later. See below, p. 129.

Wittfogel, in the context which I have just cited, refers to the ‘clan familism’ of south China as an ‘enigmatic phenomenon’. Other writers on China have also been puzzled by the appearance of large-scale lineages in Fukien and Kwangtune and by their working. It is instructive to note that the south Chinese ‘clan’ fits Fei Hsiao-tung’s scheme of Chinese society so badly that he is inclined to discount it. Having asserted that the ‘clan’ is a speciality of the gentry, he says: ‘I shall leave the question open as to the nature of the so-called clan village. I rather suspect that such an organization among the peasants is a local organization, not a kinship organization.’¹ Lineages of the kind we see in south-eastern China are of course essentially political and local organizations. If we fail to realize this and think of lineages as inflated families, we must naturally wonder how they can persist in a complex and differentiated society. As I hope to show, if the south-eastern village-lineage is an enigma, the puzzle is in its history and not in its operation.

¹ ‘Peasantry and Gentry: An Interpretation of Chinese Social Structure and its Changes’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 52, no. 1, 1946, p. 5.

The coincidence of lineage and village or village-section is phrased in different ways. I cite some of the general statements which have been made. After pointing out that in the last six or seven centuries the centres of strongly developed tsu (lineages) have been in central and southeastern China, Miss Hu Hsien-chin says that in this area ‘many villages are inhabited completely or predominantly by people of a single surname’.² In a work dealing with Kwangtung in the ’twenties of this century Chen Han-seng states that at least four out of every five peasants ‘live with their clans’ and that usually one village is inhabited by one ‘clan’. He goes on to say that ‘Even if there is more than one clan, each clan occupies a distinct section of the village; there is hardly a mixed neighborhood’.³ J. J. M. de Groot writes of the Fukien he knew at the end of the nineteenth century that the people of one village bore one ‘clan name’ only.⁴ In more recent times Miss Olga Lang reports that in Fukien and Kwangtung some villages are inhabited almost exclusively by the members of one ‘clan’, but ‘in most places, two, three, or four clans live side by side’.⁵

² Op. cit., p. 14.

³ Agrarian Problems in Southernmost China, Shanghai, 1936 (also published as Landlord and Peasant in China, New York, 1936), p. 37.

⁴ The Religious System of China, 6 vols., Leyden, 1892-1910, vol. 1,1892, p. 191. De Groot also deals with this point in Het Kongsiwezen van Borneo, Eene Verhandeling over den Grondslag en den Aard der Chineesche Politieke Vereenigingen in de Kolonien, Met eene Chineesche Geschiedenis van de Kongsi Lanfong, The Hague, 1885, pp. 82f. He points out that people with strange surnames (e.g., who find better economic opportunities in their wives’ villages than in their own) may be living in the community, but that the general rule holds that every village in China is like a single family writ large (‘ieder dorp in China is als één gezin in het groot’). Although de Groot appears to generalize here about China, he is in fact discussing the homeland of overseas Chinese: Fukien and Kwangtung.

⁵ Op. cit., pp. I73f.

As for observations on particular cases we have D. H. Kulp’s account of Phoenix Village in Kwangtung in the second decade of this century, which was one ‘sib’ except for a couple of teachers and a few shopkeepers;¹ Lin Yueh-hwa’s village of I-hsü² and the Hwang village he describes in his sociological novel,³ which were single lineage settlements in north Fukien; and G.-E. Simon’s description of Oang-Mo-Khi, also in north Fukien, where there were said to be at least 10,000 people ‘presque tous issus du mSme couple en descendance masculine’.⁴

¹ Country Life in South China, The Sociology of Familism, Volume I, Phenix Village, Ktoangtung, China, New York, 1925. (No other volume was ever published.)

² Op. cit.

³ The Golden Wing, A Sociological Study of Chinese Familism, London, 1948. I-hsii and the Hwang Village may well be the same. See below, pp. yji.

⁴ La Cité chinoise, 3rd edition, Paris, 1886.

‘Sib’, ‘clan’, and ‘single surname’ mean in such contexts that there were local communities consisting of male agnates with unmarried female agnates and the wives of the men. The rule of lineage exogamy followed, as we shall see, from the rule of surname exogamy. The relationship between agnatic group and village may be set out in a number of alternatives, of which the first was clearly very common.

One village might consist either of a single lineage or a lineage with a few ‘strangers’ whose presence was due to their special economic role.

One village might include two or more lineages, in which case these units were territorially distinct within the village.

A single descent-group might be spread over more than one village. T’ien Ju-k’ang cites an example of four villages in south Fukien arranged in this fashion.⁵ One of my informants in Singapore came from one of a cluster of seven villages in north Fukien which were all branches of a single descent group, and presumably Simon’s figure refers to an aggregation of this sort.

⁵ The Chinese of Sarawak: A Study of Social Structure, London School of Economics, Monographs on Social Anthropology, London, [1953], P- ²3⁴

Quite apart from this last possibility, we must notice that a particular localized lineage was not likely to be the only one bearing its surname in the area. This followed from the Chinese system of sumaming which, while in theory consisting of some five hundred names in modern times, has had in practice a restricted range. I have come across no material to indicate the distribution of surnames in Fukien and Kwangtung, but it seems likely from what we know of overseas Chinese that there are considerably fewer than five hundred surname...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Contents
• 1. Village and Lineage in Fukien and Kwangtung
• 2. The Economic Basis of Village Life
• 3. Family and Household
• 4. The Hierarchy of Agnatic Units
• 5. Mourning Grades
• 6. The Segmentary System
• 7. Social Differentiation within the Lineage
• 8. The Distribution of Power within the Lineage
• 9. Political Power and Economic Control
• 10. Ritual Differentiation
• 11. Ancestor Worship and Lineage Structure
• 12. Voluntary Associations
• 13. Relations between and across Lineages
• 14. The Lineage vis-à-vis the State
• 15. Discussion
• List of Works Cited
• Index