276 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
tures of antiquity. The Confucian revival that began during the Song dynasty
reached its peak in the wholesale social reform movement led by the gentry dur-
ing the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911). This movement, imagined
as a return to the social morality of antiquity, required a flurry of scholarship to
discover what morality had actually been during the Zhou and Han dynasties.
What were the “authentic rituals” of the sages? It came to focus on three core
values: filial devotion expressed in family and lineage rituals, loyalty to the mon-
arch, and wifely fidelity that became a cult of female purity (Chow 1994).The Confucian Model for Kinship and Gender
The Chinese family system has had to respond to innumerable pressures
over the centuries, not least in the turbulent decades since the 1949 founding of
the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Any kinship system is molded by a vari-
ety of forces. Family is, at bottom, the basic social unit of human survival; it
must be an all-purpose institution for reproduction, child rearing, emotional
support, and care for the elderly. During most of human history it has been the
basic unit of production and consumption, playing a fundamental economic
role. Through marital ties, it links groups together. It may be a family militia in
troubled times. Thus, economic, military, and political factors are conditions
families must respond to by formulating strategies for survival, for prosperity,
and for achievement of prestige. Finally, family cultures are products of specific
historic ideologies; families receive from the past sets of ideals—kinship ideolo-
gies—for organizing biological relationships. These ideals may or may not be
realizable in particular periods under particular circumstances, and they can
change over time. It is essential to understand the ideals that people hold and
try to emulate, as well as the conditioning factors that determine the empirical
shape of families at given historical moments.
In China, patterns for organizing kinship have been decisively shaped by
Confucian ethics. The moral imperative of xiao (hsiao), filial devotion, carried
obligations between fathers and sons further in China than perhaps in any
other Asian society. Even in Japan, to which these concepts were carried, loy-
alty to one’s lord might require a suicide that left one’s parents destitute. But for
Confucians in China, as Gilbert Rozman (1991) has put it, the debt to one’s
parents can never be repaid. The debt goes on after death, manifested in the
child’s obligation to parents to produce at least one son to continue the family
line and to revere them as ancestors with gifts, with reports of current goings-
on in the family, and, especially among common folk, with invitations to
return in spirit form during the holidays.
The ideology of the family was decidedly patriarchal in that control of
resources and the structure of authority were in male hands. Patricia Ebrey
identifies four key features of Chinese patriarchy: (1) The conception that prop-
erty, especially land, belongs to the family, not the individual. (2) This property
belongs to the men of the family and must be divided equally among brothers,