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Family Relations in Chinese History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2022
Abstract
This special issue of the Journal of Chinese History is dedicated to the studies of family relations. This introduction gives a brief survey of recent scholarship, puts the seven articles in this issue into conversation with each other, and identifies four main themes that emerge from this collection of essays.
- Type
- State of the Field Essay
- Information
- Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 , Volume 6 , Special Issue 2: Family Relations in Chinese History , July 2022 , pp. 193 - 200
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 The anthropological literature on the various aspects of the Chinese family system and family relations is incredibly rich. For a review of early work, see Ebrey, Patricia Buckley and Watson, James L., “Introduction” to Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000–1400 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1–15Google Scholar. For recent developments in the field, see the introductions and individual contributions in Brandtstädter, Susanne and Santos, Gonçalos D., eds., Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, Santos, Gonçalos D. and Harrell, Stevan, eds., Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017)Google Scholar, and Yan, Yunxiang, ed., Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century (Leiden: Brill, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Chan, Alan K. and Tan, Sor-hoon, eds., Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History (Oxford: RoutledgeCurson, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Xuewei, Kang 康學偉, Xianqin xiaodao yanjiu 先秦孝道研究 (Taipei: Wenjin, 1992)Google Scholar; Thomas Radice, The Ways of Filial Piety in Early China (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006); Fanming, Wu 吴凡明, Cong renlun zhixu dao falu zhixu: xiaodao yu handai fazhi yanjiu 從人倫秩序到法律秩序：孝道與漢代法律硏究 (Changchun: Jilin renmin, 2008)Google Scholar.
3 Knapp, Keith, Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and the Social Order in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zhitui, Yan, Family Instructions for the Yan Clan and Other Works by Yan Zhitui (531–590s), translated by Tian, Xiaofei (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Qingquan, Zou 鄒清泉, Beiwei xiaozi huaxiang yanjiu 北魏孝子画像研究 (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 2006)Google Scholar.
4 Maram Epstein, Orthodox Passions: Narrating Filial Love during the High Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019); Wilt Idema, trans., Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); and Idem a, Filial Piety and Its Divine Rewards: The Legend of Dong Yong and Weaving Maiden, with Related Texts (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009).
5 See the introduction to and multiple articles in N. Harry Rothschild and Leslie V. Wallace, eds., Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).
6 Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and Robin D.S. Yates, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb No. 247 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Robert Hegel, True Crimes in Eighteenth Century China: Twenty Case Histories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Brian McKnight and James T. C. Liu, trans., The Enlightened Judgments: Ch'ing-ming chi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
7 Robert Hegel, ed., Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Yenna Wu, trans., The Lioness Roars: Shrew Stories from Late Imperial China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 1996).
8 Patricia Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Ebrey, Chu Hsi's Family Rituals: A Twelfth Century Chinese Manual for the Performance of Cappings, Weddings, Funerals, and Ancestral Rites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics and Lineage Discourse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
9 An important early work is Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London: Athlone, 1958). For more recent studies, see Beverly Bossler, Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status and the State in Sung China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1998); Hugh R. Clark, Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River from the Late Tang through the Song (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007); Richard L. Davis, Court and Family in Sung China, 960–1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-ling Ts'ui Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou, Chiang-hsi in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); David G. Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977); and Michael Szonyi, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
10 Beverly Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016); Ann Waltner, Getting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990); Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, eds., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Arthur Wolf and Chieh-shang Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
11 Patricia Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jinhua Jia, Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China (New York: Columbia University, 2018); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Guotong Li, Migrating Fujianese: Ethnic, Family, and Gender Identities in an Early Modern Maritime World (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Man Xu, Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960–1279) (Albany: State University of New York, 2016).
12 Hsiao-wen Cheng, Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021); Jia, Gender, Power, and Talent.
13 Grace Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Xiaorong Li, Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
14 Keith Knapp, “Creeping Absolutism: Parental Authority in Early Medieval Tales of Filial Offspring,” in Confucian Cultures of Authority, edited by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, 65–91 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); and “Sympathy and Severity: The Father-Son Relationship in Early Medieval China,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident Hors-série, 2012, 113–36; Weijing Lu, “‘A Pearl in the Palm:’ A Forgotten Symbol of the Father–Daughter Bond,” Late Imperial China 31.1 (2010), 62–97; Jonathan Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
15 Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, and Ping Yao, eds., Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity, and Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014); Ping Yao, “Good Karmic Connections: Buddhist Mothers and Their Children in Tang China (618–907),” Nan Nȕ 10.1 (2008), 57–85.
16 Katherine Carlitz, “Mourning, Personality, Display: Ming Literati Commemorate Their Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters,” Nan Nü 15.1 (2013), 30–68; Martin W. Huang, Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018).
17 Patricia Ebrey, “Concubines in Sung China,” Journal of Family History 11.1 (1986), 1–24; Weijing Lu, “Uxorilocal Marriage among Qing Literati,” Late Imperial China 19.2 (1998), 64–110; Ping Yao, “Cousin Marriages in Tang China (618–907),” Ping Yao, Chinese Historical Review 18.1 (2011), 25–55; and “Until Death Do Us Unite: Afterlife Marriages in Tang China, 618–906,” Journal of Family History 27.3 (2002), 207–26.
18 Beverly Bossler, “A Daughter Is a Daughter All Her Life: Affinal Relations and Women's Networks in Song and Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 21.1 (2000), 77–106; Patricia Ebrey, “The Women in Liu Kezhuang's Family,” Modern China 10.4 (1984), 415–40.
19 There are too many items to list here. For a survey of Chinese and English scholarship, see “Introduction” to Cong Ellen Zhang, Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020).
20 Kathryn Bernhardt, Women and Property in China, 960–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Brian E. McKnight, “Who Gets It When You Go: The Legal Consequences of the Ending of Households,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43.3 (2000), 314–63; Xing Tie 邢鐵, Jiachan jicheng shilun 家產繼承史論 (Kuning: Yunnan daxue chubanshe, 2001).
21 Weijing Lu, True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
22 For an expanded discussion of this and other issues, see Weijing Lu, Arranged Companions: Marriage and Intimacy in Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).
23 For some recent studies on children and childhood, see Ping-chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Anne Behnke Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and the articles in Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995); Wang Zijin 王子今, Qin Han ertong de shijie 秦漢兒童的世界 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2018); Pei-yi Wu, “Education of Children in the Sung,” in Neo-Confucian Education: the Formative Age, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee, 307–24 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).