【正文】 ing strands on a reel. This occupation also is suited to the lavish application of labor in a subsidiary handicraft industry within a farm household. These pictures show only two out of a dozen stages in the plex process of silk production. ( Chinese woodcuts from the Tienkung kaiwu of 1637.) ? Irrigated Agriculture. ? Two men walk the treadles of a squarepallet chainpump to lift water onto the fields, and another uses a windlass to distribute water to the various crops shown around the edge of the picture. (From Tienkung kaiwu, 1637) ? Electric pumps now do this work. ? Irrigated Agriculture. ? and another uses a windlass to distribute water to the various crops shown around the edge of the picture. (From Tienkung kaiwu, 1637) ? Electric pumps now do this work. The Social Heritage ? While it would be misleading to generalize in brief terms about a society as large, ancient, and varied as that of China, there are still a few major points for an outside observer to keep in mind. ? First of all, the family, rather than the individual, the state, or the church, has formed the most significant unit in Chinese society. Each individual’s family was his chief source of economic sustenance, security, education, social contact, and recreation. ? Through ancestor worship, it was even his main religious focus. Of the five famous Confucian relationships—between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, and friend and friend—three were determined by kinship. China’s whole ethical system tended to be familycentered, not oriented toward God or the state. ? The Chinese kinship group was extensive, reaching out in each direction to the fifth generation . ? The ideal was to have all the living generations reside in one great household, divided among the various courtyards of a big pound. ? Actually this was seldom achieved except by the rich. ? A typical household seems to have averaged around five persons and was in fact a family of a type familiar in the West, rather than the ideal extended Chinese family. ? The family system was both hierarchic and authoritarian. ? The status of each person depended on his position by birth or marriage. ? Gradations of kinship were carefully spelled out in a plex terminology. ? The patriarchal father was the center of authority. ? At least in theory he controlled the family property and he arranged his children’s marriages. ? As an index of the subordination of the individual to the family, filial piety was the most admired of virtues. ? The arrangement of marriages by the respective families, for which a good deal can no doubt be said when wise matchmakers were used, symbolized more a union of families than of individuals. ? Women traditionally obeyed their fathers in youth, their husbands in middle life, and their sons in old age. ? They were expected not to remarry if widowed, but man could take secondary wives and concubines into the household. ? Except for a dowry, women had no property rights and on marriage entered their husbands’ families as humble newers. ? This tradition suggests the great potential for change that awaited China’s modern revolution. ? This authoritarian family pattern provided a basis for social order in political as well as in domestic life . ? The role of the emperor and his officials was merely that of the father writ large. ? A district magistrate was called the “father and mother” of the people. ? In a pluralistic society, like that of modern West, the many forces of church and state, capital and labor, government and private enterprise are balanced under a role of law. ? Instead, in Chinese life the personal virtues of probity and loyalty, sincerity, benevolence, inculcated by the family system, provided the norms for social conduct. ? Law was a necessary tool of administration。 but personal morality was the foundation of society. ? Far form being anarchic because of the weakness of the legal concept, Chinese society was firmly knit together by Confucianism. ? This great ethical institution occupied in China much of the place filled by both law and religion in the West. ? As in most largescale peasant societies, there was a wide gulf in power and prestige between the rulers and the ruled. ? Society was traditionally divided into four classes, which in descending order were the scholaradministrator (or warrioraristocrat in ancient times), the famer, the artisan, and the merchant. ? The scholaradministrator, as an educated man, was presumed to be morally superior. ? Exercising the supreme authority of the emperor, the paterfamilias of all Chinese society, the scholaradministrator came to dominate all aspects of public life, and also left us the voluminous record of Chinese history, which was naturally written from his rulingclass point of view.