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

The legal and social implications behind lijia registration can be clearly seen in the effort made by the compilers of the 1627 gazetteer of Pinghu County: the group reproduced a hutie in its entirety so as to establish the status of the Sun lineage as one of the most prominent and influential lineages in the county.⁴⁹ So important was the hutie as a legal document establishing one’s status and identity that it was often included in the genealogies, if it existed; if copies were no longer extant, the hutie was alluded to nevertheless.

The lijia system functioned during the first half of the Ming era, until the Tumu incident in the fifteenth century—an event that brought about a general crisis in the Ming government.⁵⁰ From that time on, administrative reforms initiated primarily by local officials began to take precedence over established practices, even in the cases of military defense, tax collection, and so forth. As the conversion of land-tax payments and corvée obligations into silver payments gradually spread during the sixteenth century, the lijia effectively became a system of fiscal accounting; local officials grew more concerned with the continuity of each taxable household (hu) in its category and less concerned with the means by which the labor service was provided.⁵¹ This shift marked the beginning of the transformation of the lijia as corvée levies came to be bound to the land tax; the hu were now assessed in terms of their landholdings.⁵² Although this fiscal transformation could have put small-scale farmers or tenant farmers who owned little or no land at an advantage because they would logically be taxed less, the opposite happened instead. The complicated fiscal system of the Ming, the lack of standardized and coordinated practices, and the lack of proper safeguards (such as credit facilities) combined in such a way that the small-scale farmers often lost their land to encroachment by wealthy landowning households—whose members then passed the burden of the land tax on to the small farmers.⁵³

By the late sixteenth century, at least, landholding and work patterns in China were being altered: the gentry or literati class were consolidating their landholdings, and peasants and tenants often found it easier to abandon their land and enter the employment market than to hold on and be liable for onerous taxes. Many found temporary jobs on public works