Chapter 7 China 277if divided at all. (3) Fathers have legal authority over women and children,
including the right to arrange the marriages of their children, sell their children,
and dispose of their labor. (4) These structures are underwritten by the notion
that women are morally and intellectually less capable than men and therefore
must be under male control (Ebrey 1990).
The hierarchies that characterized Chinese society at large began in the
family; everyone had a unique place in a domestic hierarchy whose two orga-
nizing principles were age and gender. Xiao applied proportionately to relations
between elder and younger siblings. Respect is due to anyone older than one-
self, including the twin who was born five minutes ahead of you; kinship termi-
nology distinguishes elder brother and younger brother, with many Chinese
terms for the English “cousin,” “aunt,” “uncle,” and other relations, depending
on gender and seniority. Traditionally and ideally, all the sons of a man con-
tinue to live with him in a patrilocal joint family until he dies, at which time the
sons divide the property equally and the process starts over again. This family,
called jia, thus has a natural life cycle: a man and his wife have their children,
hopefully many; as sons reach adulthood, wives are brought in for them, while
daughters are married out to other households. Eventually a number of nuclear
families are all living together in one large, well-ordered, and clearly hierarchi-
cal household. The men are a tightly bonded unit of fathers and sons. The
women who begin as strangers brought in from the outside to share their lives
as mothers- , sisters- , and daughters-in-law become the loyal and fertile moth-
ers of the lineage and eventually ancestresses as well.
The benefits of such great households were many. They shared a common
budget with the expenses of a single household. The eldest male was the chief
executive officer of this family corporation, using the capital of several sons’
labors to make investments and expenditures for the welfare of the whole. This
included a great house with four connected wings around a central courtyard,
perhaps double-storied as well, allowing apartments for each married couple
and their children. There was certain to be an ancestral shrine in a prominent
location in the main hall. The fund of family capital may be used to buy land,
invest in a business, educate the sons, provide dowries for all the daughters,
support servants to do much of the labor, and perhaps provide an unofficial
second “wife,” a concubine, for the head of household. Such a family, fulfilling
the Confucian ideal, was what most Chinese aspired to throughout the ages;
however, empirical studies suggest that this ideal was never within reach for
most Chinese families. The ideal was far more frequently achieved in gentry
families than in peasant families. If a family was poor, sons had to leave in
search of work; a daughter might be sold into servanthood or given as a child-
bride to another poor family who would bear the cost of feeding her to ensure a
farm son would get a wife at all. Mortality rates, alone, were stacked against
the ideal Confucian great family; the chances of a couple surviving to old age
with several adult sons and many little grandchildren who survived the perils
of infancy were a demographic long shot.