China's Traditional Family, Its Characteristics and Disintegration

T 11HIS paper attempts to define the traditional Chinese family system which persisted through two thousand years without any substantial change. In the pages that follow the model of this system is described to represent the family of the gentry and officialdom, although the deviation of a peasant household would be slight, for in China the peasant is an earnest imitator of the life patterns established by the gentryscholar class. However lasting as was China's traditional family, the early half of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid disintegration of this age-old institution among the modern-educated intellectuals in the large cities and trade ports, and the emergence of the conjugal family as a sharp competitor. Under the impetus of the present social revolution the destruction of this system has penetrated to all groups of society and to the vast interior.