For thirty years, David Faure has been deconstructing our image of an “eternal” and timeless China. According to this image, China was a society dominated by Confucian scholars from powerful families: the “gentry”. Their core values were expressed in the form of family ideology and ancestor worship and seemed inscribed since time immemorial, especially in South China, in the very structure of the villages where the vast majority of the population still lived. Hence, the most beautiful buildin..

Lagerwey, John

OpenEdition

 China Perspectives 
2007/3 | 2007
Creating a Harmonious Society
David Faure, Emperor and ancestor: State and
lineage in South China
John Lagerwey
Édition électronique
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2353
ISSN : 1996-4617
Éditeur
Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine
Édition imprimée
Date de publication : 15 septembre 2007
ISSN : 2070-3449
 
Référence électronique
John Lagerwey, « David Faure, Emperor and ancestor: State and lineage in South China », China
Perspectives [En ligne], 2007/3 | 2007, mis en ligne le 09 avril 2008, consulté le 28 octobre 2019. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2353 
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 octobre 2019.
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David Faure, Emperor and ancestor:
State and lineage in South China
John Lagerwey
1 For thirty years, David Faure has been deconstructing our image of an “eternal” and
timeless China. According to this image, China was a society dominated by Confucian
scholars from powerful families: the “gentry”. Their core values were expressed in the
form  of  family  ideology  and  ancestor  worship  and  seemed  inscribed  since  time
immemorial, especially in South China, in the very structure of the villages where the
vast majority of the population still lived. Hence, the most beautiful building in these
southern villages, the one built at the very centre of the village, would invariably be the
ancestor shrine. 
2 This  image  of  China  served as  the  basis  of  the  organisation of  our  knowledge  and
judgement:  if  corruption and nepotism characterised Imperial  and then Republican
China, including its trade relations with the West, if China despised merchants and had
no laws to protect trade and private property, if China was incapable of modernising
itself,  and,  more  recently,  if  China  had  no  “civil  society”,  it  was  because  it  was
Confucian,  and  because  Confucius,  already,  had  prized  relationship  values—such  as
filial piety and loyalty—more highly than abstract laws applicable to all. 
3 In his first book, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society : Lineage and Village in the Eastern
New Territories, Hong Kong (Hong Kong and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), Faure
had demonstrated that there was another China, not of lineage but of territory, not of
ancestors but of the gods honoured in Taoist worship. In this new book, which has been
twenty years in the making (p. xi), he describes how the China in which our distorted
image originates  emerged during the Ming Dynasty  (1368-1644)  and then prevailed
under  the  Qing (1644-1911),  before  being eradicated in  the  revolutions  of  the  20th
century. It is the most ambitious attempt ever written to rethink the history of modern
China and, thus to restore China to its rightful place in a world history struggling to
invent  itself.  Any  attentive  reader  of  this  book  will  no  longer  take  part  in  the
sometimes  inquisitorial  and always  arrogant  debates  about  what  China  “lacked”  in
David Faure, Emperor and ancestor: State and lineage in South China
China Perspectives, 2007/3 | 2007
1
order to invent capitalism, democracy, science, civil society and human rights, in short:
“modernity”. 
4 The book’s thread, to summarize it in a few lines, begins before the Ming (Chapters 2 to
5), when the State and its Confucian ideology had hardly penetrated the region of the
Pearl River Delta, of which this book recounts the history. Nonetheless, a distinction
had  already  emerged  between  “us”—the  administered  population  and  its
administrators— and “them”, the Dan (people of the water),  the Yao (people of the
mountain), and later, the Hakka. At the heart of this society were local temples, and
above all, Buddhist monasteries, with enormous estates and special relationships with
the government.  It  was under the Ming (chapters 6 to 12) that the modern lineage
developed. The registering of the population at the beginning of this dynasty was the
first step in this development. In the mid-15th century, with the monetarisation of the
economy and the  establishment  of  a  single  tax  calculated  in  silver,  the  population
registers that served as the base of taxation and forced labour, were transformed into
land registers whose only purpose was raising taxes. This was to completely transform
the relationship between the State and society since the State, henceforth, was more
interested in the land register than in the population. Since, in the meantime, lineages
had appeared, there was no other entity more suitable for ensuring the registering of
lands and the collection of taxes. 
5 Indeed, under the influence of the neo-Confucian ideology of Zhu Xi, which from the
beginning  of  the  dynasty  became  State  orthodoxy,  the  right  to  sacrifice  to  one’s
ancestors, which up till then had been exclusively reserved to aristocrats and higher
officials, had begun to spread, until in the 1530s, it was extended to commoners, who
even acquired the right to sacrifice to the “founding ancestors”. The collective practice
of sacrificing to a distant ancestor, usually the real or imaginary founder of a village or
a group of villages, encouraged a sense of linear belonging which transcended space
and time, and was thus one of the necessary conditions for the emergence of the vast
and wealthy lineages of South China under the Ming and the Qing. At the same time,
the fact  that  the  State  did  not  require  that  lands  be  registered by their  individual
owners but allowed them to be registered collectively, made it possible for lineages to
register their lands under the names of their ancestors, and thus to make the lineage a
real corporation. (Thus was born the “family business”, so typical of China before 1949.)
6 It was therefore the blending of ideological and practical concerns, at the level of both
State and scholars,  which led the lineages to transform villages by placing in their
centre  a  shrine  dedicated  to  their  ancestors  and  pushing  to  the  edges,  or  even
eradicating  completely,  the  now  “indigenous”  divinities  (p.  193).  The  Confucian
“standardisation” of southern Chinese society was accompanied by campaigns against
the Yao, and the destruction of popular temples, including Buddhist monasteries (there
were two major local campaigns, in 1489 and 1521). In 1537, Huo Tao, a man from the
Delta who was Minister of Rites at the time, even organised attacks against monasteries
in  Beijing.  Faure  concludes  that  “The  new society  which  emerged  during  the  16th
century began to look like the society led by the gentry which students of 19th century
China long took to be a ‘tradition’ which was never called into question in China” (p.
148). 
7 Since the essence of Faure’s thesis aims at explaining how neo-Confucian lineage came,
under the Ming Dynasty, to embody local society and thus to become the privileged
interlocutor of the State, the present review will not dwell on the Qing epoch (Chapters
David Faure, Emperor and ancestor: State and lineage in South China
China Perspectives, 2007/3 | 2007
2
13 to 22). These chapters are, however, as rich in detail as the previous ones on the
evolution  of  local  society  in  its  transactions  with  the  State.  In  these  chapters  we
witness the “proliferation of lineage institutions” (Chapter 14), the development in the
religious domain of a growing gap between the scholars and the people (Chapter 15),
the “incorporation” of lineage by means of its rituals as well as by the ownership of
land (Chapter 16) and then, after chapters on business prosperity in the 18th century
and  the  militarisation  of  society  in  the  19th  century,  the  attribution  of  China’s
weakness  and  backwardness  in  comparison  with  Western  invaders  to  the  same
institution of the lineage which, according to Liang Qichao, writing after his return
from the United States in 1904, explains why the Chinese “are qualified to be people of
the lineage, but not citizens” and even less of being individuals (pp. 344-45). 
8 In his epilogue (Chapter 23), after referring to the evidence which tends to prove that
Chinese society evolved in other regions in the same way as in the Pearl River Delta,
David Faure concludes with a heartfelt call for an end to history written without any
resort to field work: “One has to travel to be impressed by China’s vastness and its
varied character. One has to travel also to see at first hand the relics that stand as
testimony of the society of a bygone age. And one has to travel even to gather the
documentary  information  that  still  abides  on  stone  steles  or  fragments  of  paper
tenderly  preserved in  private  hands.  Time is  running out  for  this  approach to  the
writing of Chinese history” (p. 368).
David Faure, Emperor and ancestor: State and lineage in South China
China Perspectives, 2007/3 | 2007
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