Chapter 7 China 285cratic control by the Chinese Communist Party replaced traditional private
entrepreneurial and kinship structures. The full socialist era lasted from 1958 to
- Family and lineage were decisively reorganized during those times; the
great lineages were special targets of those reforms. The Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) tried to destroy lineage solidarity by assigning each villager to a
class category: poor peasant, middle peasant, rich peasant, landlord. The lower
statuses were then made to attack, humiliate, and seize the property of the rich
peasants and landlords who were their kinsmen. Ancestor worship was
declared a superstition and forbidden. Cremation rather than burial was encour-
aged, to save land and to undermine reverence of ancestors. Large expenditures
for kinship ceremonies like weddings and funerals were harshly discouraged,
and no one could afford them in any case. The Marriage Law of 1950 prohib-
ited concubinage and child betrothal, which disappeared almost immediately,
and permitted women to sue for divorce, prompting two million divorces in the
first three years. Putting everyone to work in communes gave women the eco-
nomic security to take advantage of the new opportunity for divorce.
All of these changes reduced or eliminated the economic logic of the tradi-
tional family system, as well as rendering its ideology politically incorrect. Par-
adoxically, however, some of these changes brought core family ideals within
the grasp of many who had never managed to realize them before. Access to
health care reduced mortality rates, which meant most people actually had
larger kin networks than before. Restrictions on internal migration kept men in
their home towns or villages; in the southern provinces of Guangdong and
Fujian where large lineages had been most common in the past, these restric-
tions on movement and the collectivization of citizens put kinsmen who sur-
vived the earlier struggles to work in the same communes, thus preserving
them, even though ancestral halls had been turned into work unit headquarters
and genealogies had been burned. A few old women still worshipped their
ancestors by burning mosquito coils, but in the early years of Communist rule,
most people seemed to give up the old customs rather easily.
The next round of kinship changes, following the death of Mao in 1976,
offered thrusts in two opposite directions. First, decollectivization in the early
1980s returned 80 percent of all agricultural lands to farm families on 15-year
leases, and rural markets were reopened. Once again, farmers had economic
incentives to work hard, invest in their farms, and raise livestock. Graham E.
Johnson describes the effects of liberalization on lineage practices in the Pearl
River delta:
While the full elaboration of all aspects of the operation of lineage cannot be
contemplated, many of them are once again practiced. Graves have been
repaired, rituals are performed at the graves of apical ancestors, ancestral halls
are being restored, ritual feasts occur in the halls once more, lineage libraries
are being refurbished, and lineage officers have begun to act as agents for mem-
bers of the lineage, similar to the way the administrators of lineage trusts inter-
vened on behalf of members in the period before 1949. (Johnson 1993:132)