Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China: The Impact o ...

sixteenth century. Although much of the social changes taking place at that time had to do with the economic transformation of the lower Yangzi delta and the spread of education, literacy, and literati norms among the people in Haining, the argument advanced here is that a greater stimulus for change can be traced to the crisis in the 1550s and 1560s that was caused by alleged Japanese pirates, or wokou, to use Ming terminology, along the coast. By engendering a sense of crisis that necessitated the expansion of imperial authority into rural society—expansion that in turn led to reconfigurations of local society—the Japanese pirates contributed to the creation of lineage society in Haining. This study examines the details of that transformation.

The Choice of Haining

In such a study of local history, not only the official histories but also county gazetteers and collections of literary writings by personalities of the era are useful sources of information regarding the historical developments and events that took place within the locality. However, more useful are the records of the people themselves: such documents can be found in the form of the Chinese genealogy. As a genre that reemerged in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) due to the efforts of reformers such as Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), the Chinese genealogy was compiled with the oft-stated intentions of revering the ancestors and unifying the clan.³ Overtly based on ideals of Confucian familism, the genealogy is largely a creation of the literati that carried, by virtue of the education of its compilers, connotations not only of elitism but also of authority. But at the same time, it is also an archival collection that functioned as the transmitter of collective memory. Moreover, the genealogy is continually updated: each successive compilation makes use of documents and information deemed to be of significant historical, moral, and ideological value to the lineage or community in question. If we understand the lineage as a grassroots form of social organization in late imperial China, then the genealogies created by the lineages afford us the closest possible views of the general populace of this era. These archives—unlike