The Chinese clan : its rise and consequences

Abstract

The Chinese clan was a predominant institution that prevailed in the last four centuries of imperial China. Bonded together by lineages related to the same ancestor, this kindship-based institution provided public goods to its members to insure them against such economic risks as famine and landlessness, and to facilitate economic growth by investing in infrastructural projects such as roads, ports and bridges. Yet, owing to data limitations, the Chinese clan – particularly its secular rise and consequences – has not been examined systematically. Using original data on 18685 ancestral halls collected from more than 4500 local gazetteers, Chapter 2 examines the evolution of the Chinese clan organization from 1136 to 1935. Over time, it finds a drastic increase of ancestral halls after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, primarily due to the ritual reform of 1536. Across China, more ancestral halls and denser clan networks were found in the south and the Low Yangtze region, suggesting that the development of clan organization in historical China was highly uneven. Regarding the identity of the builders, evidence shows that most ancestral halls were built by the commoners rather than high-ranking officials. This chapter thus seeks to offer a novel perspective on the development of the clan organization in historical China as well as provide a new data source for future research. By enumerating the ancestral halls – a hallmark of clans – across all of China for the 1136-1935 period, we exploit two sources of variation to account for its ascendance in Chapter 3. Temporally, we rely on the Ritual Reform Act of 1536AD – a law enacted by an emperor with the effect of lifting the restrictions of low-level officials and commoners to establish ancestral halls to worship their ancestors – as an explanation of why the clan only rose since then. Across space, we exploit the geographic variation in land suitable for rice cultivation to identify pockets of growth; premised on the assumptions that rice cultivation, which produces a surplus over other crops, relies on irrigation, and irrigation requires significantly greater cooperation. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that a doubling of the land suitable for rice cultivation after 1536 leads to a 3.16 percent increase in newly built ancestral halls. Moreover, consistent with the aim of the ritual reform, we find that the majority of ancestral halls were established by the commoners, i.e., those who had not attained any civil exam qualifications or held official titles previously. Chapter 4 is devoted to examining the effect of the clan organization on the provision of public goods in historical China. By analyzing data on 18685 ancestral halls and 180522 infrastructural projects, we find that more infrastructural projects were built in counties with more clan organizations. To deal with the endogenous problem, we employ the interaction between the exogenous shock of ritual reform and the geographical variation in the rice suitable-lands as the instrumental variable for identifying the clan organization. The 2SLS result confirms that the clan has a causal effect on public goods provision.