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

in the Ming dynasty, lineage organization evolved gradually among the general populace from its basis in the Ming system of household registration. The process was helped, no doubt, by social pretensions as well as by the growing popular acceptance of neo-Confucian descent ethics, which were made fashionable by a change in the ritual regulations of the Ming court in 1536. In much of China, the lineage organization that developed throughout the sixteenth century eventually took the now familiar form of group alignments on the basis of kinship relations expressed physically and symbolically through ancestral halls, common burial grounds, corporate trust estates, and the compilation of genealogies.

In some ways, the transformation of social organization and the popularization of descent-line ethics had much to do with the spread of literacy among the nonelite—a phenomenon that brought with it the attendant spread of Confucian literati and gentrified cultural norms that propagated ways in which one might exemplify the virtue of filial piety in one’s life.² During the late imperial period, the ideal of filial piety was in many ways coterminous with ideas of hierarchy within the family that, when extended to include all social relations—including that between an emperor and his subject—and when adhered to properly, would ensure social stability in the realm. As the institution representative of kinship organization and hence also of social relations, the lineage came to carry special significance in Chinese history and in studies of Chinese kinship as the buttress of social hierarchies, forces of morality, and ritual propriety. As this idea of unifying agnatic kinsmen in order to honor the ancestors gradually reached the lower levels of society, it brought about a corresponding change in the way local society was organized in China. But this shift in social organization also had to do with the economic changes that were taking place in China during the sixteenth century, especially in the lower Yangzi or Jiangnan region, which was the locus of the expansion of commerce and commodity production as well as of the gradual integration of China into world markets and international trade networks.

This book is about the changes in local society and social organization that took place in the county of Haining in Zhejiang Province during the