The Traditional Chinese Clan Rules (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Traditional Chinese Clan Rules

Generally speaking, the traditional Chinese families can be classified into three distinctive types according to their respective Sizes: the small-sized conjugal family, the large - Sized joint family, and the medium-sized stem family.3 The first type consists of the man, his Wife, their unmarried children, and sometimes his unmarried brothers and sisters. This was the type of family for the majority of the people, with an estimated average Size of five and one-half persons.4 Married sons left the Old family to set up their own house holds elsewhere. The second type, the large-sized joint family, maintained by many wealthy Chinese with pride, contains not only the conjugal unit of the head Of the family, but that of his brothers, of his sons, of his grandsons, and even of his great-grandsons. These conjugal units who lived in the same household and shared the com mon property were not separate families but component units within one family. In celebrated, though rare, cases, a joint family spanned five Or more generations along the paternal line of descent. To live together as a joint family had several advantages: to increase the total capital accumulation; to pool the social prestige earned by all its prominent members; to carry on the best family vocation and at the same time to have other members take care of the diversified family interests; and to attain social distinction as a large, prosperous family.5 In most cases, when a joint family contained four generations.

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