Family History in China at a Crossroads: Family Narratives,Personal Memory,and Public History

Family History in China: A Brief History

A family (Jiating) is defined as a basic social and economic unit bonded by a specific form of marriage and is characterized by individuals living, working on the property, and eating together. The family’s collective cousin, that is, a clan (Jiazu), is a social organization characterized by the descendants of the male ancestors with the same family name, who are united by blood relations, abide by certain rules and regulations, and live together in a specific place for generations. Zu, which originally means many arrows in the same bag, has acquired a connotation of coming together in the Chinese language. A strong sense of kinship lies at the core of both the family and the clan.

Four types of families have existed throughout the Chinese ancient history. The first type is the patrilineal system in primitive societies. These families were united by blood relations, and managed through the male lineage, with no class differentiation. The second type is the patriarchal clan system, which emerged during the Yin and Zhou periods (1046 BC–221 BC). These families centered on blood relationships, with slave holders and slaves at the opposite ends of the class spectrum. With a shared family name, a leader (zongzhu), and a set of regulations, this family represented a much more organized and closely knit social system. The word zong, that is, the radical on the top side of the Chinese character, symbolizes sacrifice, and the original meaning of the word was the house of worship and sacrifice. The system functioned on relative inheritance to maintain clan continuity. Ancestor worship spiritually bonded the clan members, and the leader led the worship and sacrifice and indoctrinated the members with ethics and ideas of kinship love, thus enhancing their bonds. The patrilineal temple, that is, zongmiao, was built to accommodate such collective rituals. The architectural plans often revealed class and social hierarchy. Public burial grounds and clan tombs were popular. Family genealogy, in which a family tree recorded the intricate relationships among the clan members, appeared and developed following the invention of the written word. Previously, oral tradition was the only way to trace the family tree.

The third type, that is, the aristocratic clan system, existed from the Weijin period (220 AD–420 AD) to the Tang dynasty (618 AD–907 AD) and was a combination of the manor system and clans. This type referred to families and clans who lived, migrated, and buried together. Ancestor worship remained an important collective ritual. Family genealogy became more popular in three forms. The first form was the family biography, which was usually written to glorify the family name. The second form was the family tree (jiapu), or clan genealogy (zupu), which was a skeleton type of tree that documented names and delineated blood relationships. The third form was official genealogical records, which were recognized by the imperial government and used to classify nobles and common people. Around the mid-Tang dynasty, the aristocratic clan system along with the official genealogies that compiled and recorded these prominent lineages started to decline. The primary purpose of the family genealogy was to confirm the social hierarchy. The rigidity impacted both individuals and family relationships and further differentiated the haves from the have-nots. Wars, massive migrations, and tumultuous political struggles led to the disappearance of the genealogical records.

Since the Song dynasty (960 AD–1276 AD), the patrilineal system evolved. This type of system was a social organization based on a blood relationship with common properties. The beliefs and sacrificial activities were an integral part of a family’s cultural and spiritual lives. Some beliefs, such as totem worship, practiced by the clans were also practiced by the whole tribe. Ancestor worship and sacrifice appeared later. Each clan had a public burial ground, which was usually located near the village or the common property, allowing members of the same clan to be conveniently be buried together. Two types of clan systems supported the patrilineal system. One system was vertical, with a tight-knit clan system, and the other system was horizontal, with large families living together for generations. The former often broke into scattered, individual families who shared the same ancestors and remained connected through a lineage hall, family genealogy, and the clan field. Thus, the clan system has had a profound impact on family patterns. ³ The traditional family or clan records, which were usually kept in ancestral shines and updated by the elders of a family, record the genealogy from the father’s side centering on key persons. Family genealogies evolved from the aristocratic families and events of the imperial time. The earliest work, that is, ShiBen, was compiled by official historians, who recorded the names and relationships of prominent lineages. Used to promoted and serve political interests, genealogies became a specialized field starting during the Liuchao period (222 AD–589 AD) until the Tang dynasty. During the Song dynasty, private genealogies appeared, marking a fundamental difference from the previous dynasties.

The idea that the family has always been an integral part of personal identity, national interests, and cosmopolitan aspirations run through the above four types of families. The individual, the family, the nation, and the world blend into a seamless whole. Family histories rest upon such quintessentially Chinese cultural assumptions and have evolved with the changing idea of kinship and family. While David Schneider originates the classic anthropological conception of kinship, ⁴ Marshall Sahlins gracefully defines it as “mutuality of being,” ⁵ and it “covers the variety of ethnographically documented ways kinship is locally constituted.” ⁶ If kinship is the relationship that reveals and reinforces certain dimensions of the cultural order, it moves beyond a pure and simple commensality into a more culturally sophisticated “relatedness.” The classic text of the Daxue connects moral self-cultivation with general harmony in the state and society. ⁷ The objective of building up a moral character is to “enlighten the lucid virtue” (ming ming de), to “approach the people” (qin min), and “to stop at the utmost goodness” (zhi yu zhi shan). Family plays a part in this grand equation. The regulation of one’s family depends on the cultivation of his personal moral character building, according to the adage. If regulating one’s family manifests harmony with the state, those at the higher levels of the ruling hierarchy play a critical role. A benevolent ruler is nevertheless not sufficient for the welfare of the people. It is necessary for everybody to study the world (ge wu) before they can reach perfect knowledge (zhi zhi), and only with perfect knowledge, people can accomplish sincerity (cheng yi). Only with sincerity, one can rectify one’s heart (zheng xin), and only in this way, man can practice self-cultivation (xiu shen). Once cultivated, one’s own family is united (qi jia), and only families that are in a state of unison can be governed (zhi guo) in the right way. If all these steps are achieved, there will be peace on earth (ping tianxia). This fairly cosmopolitan view of the relationships among the individual, the family, and the state explains how family history and national history have mutually evolved and indicates a relational rather than a structural understanding of kinship and family. ⁸

The linkage between the family and the nation is further sustained through material cultures, clan rules, rituals, such as ancestor worship, and a strong attachment to the patriarchal system. The classic ritual Liji says that one should respect the ancestors and that the clans should stay together (Jinzongshouzu). Those who are connected by blood relationships should love each other and remain together all the time, which is borrowed and interpreted as the key rationale for the ancient kinship governing structure, and the institutional reconstruction of the clan system under a range of historical circumstances.

More specifically, the ancient connection to the ancestors reinforces the family ideal of connection and symbolizes a blessing for future generations. For example, the lineage hall, in its historical variations, ⁹ represents an architectural expression of the unity and continuity of the clan; this hall is a place for ancestor worship, for lectures on the clan rules or laws and for discussions relates to clan affairs. Second, burial practices, sacrificial ceremonies, and rituals have been faithfully performed for centuries. The practices that satisfy both ethical and emotional ends reflect a deep connection to the land. Agricultural civilizations believe that the best way for a dead person to rest permanently is to be returned to the land, thus burial grounds are sacred as follows: one finds eternal peace when laid to rest in the land. This belief is also infused with the following circular interpretation of life: as life originates from the earth, life returns back to the earth. Falling leaves return to their roots, as the Chinese saying goes. Yellow, the color of the earth, is deemed holy. Among the five xing of Ying and Yang, the earth, or tu, lies in the middle, suggesting that it is the most stable, reliable, and fundamental of all. Ideally, the clan should be buried together in an eternal family reunion; according to the saying in Zhouli, “Live closely, and die closely” (source: Zhouli, Dasitu). The judicial and ritual aspects and material culture have been strongly privileged and dutifully performed and preserved throughout all dynasties, although how these components actually impact individual families remains a mystery.

The decline of the traditional family and clan ¹⁰ began at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century. With the political turmoil and radical changes of the time, the “family revolution” in 1919 clearly connected the family to the traditional values and ethics that the public intellectuals were trying to break. In 1931, the Civil Code of the Republic of China represented an ideal. ¹¹ At approximately the same time, the New History emerged, which introduced Darwin’s theory of evolution into historical studies, emphasizing that historical research should focus on groups, not individuals, as history should be treated as an interrelated and organic whole; historical studies should utilize theories and methods from other disciplines including geography, anthropology, religion, political science, and law. This cosmopolitan outlook has pushed the boundaries of curiosity and expanded the field of history. History stopped referring only to the activities and power struggles of the ruling elites and extended into all aspects of social life, including most mundane phenomena such as marriage and family. If human evolution is a collective endeavor, one has to trace its roots to the most basic unit, that is, the family and the clan. ¹²

Around the same time, sociology and other closely related disciplines such as ethnology, anthropology, and folklore studies made their way into China. Family history became an important part of research crossing these disciplinary boundaries. One of the founding works in ethnology, On Ethnology, uses the ethnology theories to analyze ancient matriarchy systems. ¹³ The receptive mood during the early twentieth century provided a welcoming energy for developing family history studies. Thus, during the 1940s, family history was systematically revived, and the scope of the field expanded to include ordinary people. However, the newly established government of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 proscribed the development of sociology as a discipline, and family history was degraded as being a vestige of the feudal (another word for evil under the communist rule) age. This hostile political climate, filled with leftism and anticapitalism, continued until the end of the Cultural Revolution (CR; 1966–1976). Sociology, with which family history was associated, was criticized and marginalized. From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, family history studies in mainland China were disrupted. Very few works were based on field research largely due to the political constraints, although a few scattered studies appeared in Hong Kong and Taiwai, which were more liberal at the time. ¹⁴

Since the 1980s, family history studies have experienced another revival. The studies mainly fall into the following four categories: ¹⁵ (a) the feudal family/clan system which has always been an integral and nicely complementary part of the Chinese feudal system and was characterized by male patriarchy and entrenched autocracy for almost 2,000 years; (b) the internal structures, activities, and relationships of the family/clan; (c) the social function and role of the family as an organization and institution, especially its double-edged role in slowing down productivity and societal development while simultaneously promoting a social morale and interpersonal relationships at the grassroots level; and (d) family history studies with a geographical focus or a particular theme, such as the clan system during the Shang and Zhou periods, the clan structures in Fujian Province, the relationship between businessman and the clan system in Anhui Province, and the clan field studies. ¹⁶

Where did these studies fail? The problems are related more to the approach than the subjects. Despite the rise and fall largely associated with political whims and wills, family history remains predominantly private, and family history studies, which are mostly of official and scholarly interest, adopt a structural approach. Such an approach believes that social and cultural phenomena can be explained by being referred to as systemic mechanisms, as Levi-Straussian structuralists believe that “A deeper unity and systematicity lie behind the seemingly bewildering variety of social and cultural phenomena.” ¹⁷ In this vein, the family and clan are both parts of a patriarchal system; their existence, development, and decline all function within this system, and such an analysis focuses on these structural features. The concepts such as “relationality, memory, biography, embeddedness, and imaginary,” which are integral to a relational interpretation of kinship, ¹⁸ are inadvertently eschewed.

Consequently, the understanding of “relatedness” is far too limited and limiting. ¹⁹ First, compiling genealogies of prominent lineages center almost entirely on the male patriline. Such a family genealogy, written with selective coverage in a largely self-fashioning manner, strives to glorify the family name or find an association with an aristocratic lineage and often testifies and justifies the very power structure. Methodologically, these studies rarely question the assumptions and the sources. ²⁰ The fact that very minimal private correspondence between family members either exists or survives also poses further limits.

Second, such works are kept to a chosen few and remain exclusively accessed by scholars. However, rigorously carried out, the works seem incapable of recognizing the creative psychology embedded deep in family histories, much less drawing a logical connection between family histories and their accumulative effects following changes on a larger scale. The seemingly legitimate and authoritative sources offer an incomplete picture at best. Historians approach these works faithfully and with assiduity, but they rarely question or criticize the established categories of analysis. The documents they cull from the archives are official records, and the units of analysis, such as families, households, ancestral temples, and clan fields, are embedded in the institutional assumptions; but who has the right to claim that the family or clan should be interpreted as an institution? Who defines the concept of family? Why is the nuclear, heterosexual family automatically assumed, while the nonheterosexual family is silenced? Why do certain issues take priority? The synthesis of these concepts simply cannot explain the exigencies and chance events that fall outside of the established categories.

The family genealogy left the imperial offices and has been embraced by the masses since the Song dynasty, but it was compiled, interpreted, and preserved largely in the same manner as before when the family historians and genealogists were employed by the imperial government. Elite scholars and philosophers, such as Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao, and Zhu Xi, among other neo-Confucianists, sought to redefine the idea and structure of the family. These writers advocated for a very specific design for the family and the clan as a part of a strictly controlled, blood-related, and tight-knit patriarchal system. The clan rules, moral and ethical obligations, lineage halls, and clan fields tied each clan together. This approach fit the overall governing structure and expectations of the imperial government well and was thus strongly supported by the state power. However, the lives of the ordinary people were missing. Their values, characters, and life trajectories slipped into the nameless masses. Genealogical records either ignored or misconstrued the actual lives of the ordinary people, as if they were not a part of the national history, and the ordinary people became one of the nameless nonvariables in the grand historical synthesis. Both the assumption upon which the systematic approach is based and the incomplete sources lead to an additional question. The ritual and judicial dimensions of kinship, clan rules, and ancestor worship often dominate the analyses of family histories, and few fieldwork data are collected to understand the actual impact of these rituals and rules. ²¹

Last, even though census, birth, death, marriage, and migration data have become more available, these sources provide very minimal insight into the psychology, attitudes, and emotions of ordinary people. Here, the contest between history and memory surfaces. Beneath personal narratives and family memories lies the intersection of history and memory. In competing over the same terrain of the past, history sometimes works with memory, while other times, there are certain places of the past that only memory knows and preserves, and memory works as a guide to our understanding of the past. However, historians are slow to embrace the fact that along with archives and libraries, a separate and parallel line of private accounts exists, where stories, memories, and histories intertwine. Therefore, we encounter the following fundamental problem with these works based on a referred system or structural mechanism: these accounts lack the adequate explanatory power in analyzing the microprocedural development of the emerging dynamic practices of family history.

A Changing Landscape: Family History from Below

On January 13, 2018, The Economist published an article about family trees and ancestral belongings in China. The article observes that over the past couple of decades, clan associations have reestablished themselves and worked to recompile zupu. The article also notes that websites are helping to make the search for family trees easier and even predicts that “with luck, searching for ancestors will someday be as easy as online shopping.” ²² In Western democracies, family data and census records have been stored and shared through libraries, church registers, and consequently websites, whereas in China, constructing an accurate genealogy poses a notable challenge precisely because of the patchy and sometimes falsified family or clan records. Conventional wisdom runs as follows: there is very limited genealogical data in the official record, and much less data are available for public use. In fact, “local gazettes often provided information about members of prominent families but were silent about the masses.” ²³ Not anymore. During the twenty-first century, technology, especially new media, has changed and challenged the status quo. Digitalized historical sources enhance access to family histories; thus, family history research has become dynamic, diverse, and fluid.

While constructing an accurate family genealogy remains challenging, The Economist article strikes home the following point: family history has taken a populist turn in China. Ordinary people build their family trees and meticulously trace their genealogies. Previously, strictly personal, private, and intimate stories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and family ephemera have become available representing a shifting combination of history and memory and the private and the public. As Hilda Kean writes in her wonderful study on creating personal and public histories of the working class in London, “The bits and pieces of personal lives can also be the subject matter of public histories, histories outside university rooms and libraries, that emphasize the engagement with history now.” ²⁴ Tracing and researching one’s family history and constructing one’s genealogy is relevant, fun, and accessible. What follows is an illustrative discussion that sketches the landscape; the cited cases are by no means exhaustive but provide hints for understanding the changes.

A Blurring Boundary between the Private and the Public

Since the 1990s, family genealogy, as a part of the local chronicles that used to be strictly kept in the private sphere, are currently organized, catalogued, and sometimes even digitized as archival sources and are available to the public. As a result, more diverse and expansive family archives are emerging. “Amateur” and mundane sources that were traditionally scorned by professional historians, ranging from letters, diaries, ephemera, and oral histories to collective biographies, have triggered a revived interest in compiling, collecting, researching, and preserving family genealogies. A renewed passion for restoring lineage halls, especially in the rural villages where land remains a critical part of people’s everyday lives, has also appeared. Two examples illustrate that what used to be private and personal has become public and actively consumed by ordinary Chinese people.

My China Roots, which is one of the first professional genealogy companies in China, was established in Beijing in 2012 to help people of Chinese descent overseas search for their Chinese roots as well as preserve their family records, lineage halls, ancestral temples, and other family history-related cultural heritage. Working with scholars, clan associations, fellow societies, and a few government agencies, My China Roots has successfully helped more than 100 overseas Chinese search for their relatives and connections in China. However, its service extends beyond seeking for traces of the family past and moves into contextualizing “ancestories” within the large picture. In detailed reports, customers’ family stories are narrated within a broader social history and are richly illustrated with photos and pictures. The company also organizes and tailors root trips for its customers to travel to places that are of specific interest to their family history, such as clan associations and ancestral villages.

The company targets people of Chinese descent who were born overseas and are seeking for long-lost family ties in China. Although waves of Chinese migration have occurred throughout history, there was a huge surge of Chinese laborers leaving for the Americas, Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia from the middle of the nineteenth century up to 1949. The first group of Chinese immigrants to the United States departed from Guangdong Province, which was an international trading port. In 1848, news of gold in California spread as wildfire throughout Southern China and many people emigrated. There were also other early Chinese migrants with a variety of professions, from seamen to diplomats.

The motivations for tracing such a family genealogy are mixed, but the search for long-lost family ties and connections is tangentially related to ethnicity or aristocratic affiliation, according Huihan Lie, the founder of My China Roots comments: “For people in their twenties, finding one’s genealogical roots is often part of their journey of self-discovery. Customers who are in their thirties or forties often have children or are in mixed marriages, and they want to know what family history to pass on to their children. For the older generations, it is often about unanswered questions and self-reflection. No matter the reason, it is all about identity in the end—a search for who they are.” ²⁵ As Simone Weil writes beautifully in The Need for Roots, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” ²⁶ The driving force behind this craze is a universal and elemental need for roots, for identity, and for connection. The growing popularity of family history simply testifies to the presence of a void that needs to be filled.

What are the possibilities and obstacles? Pivotal to the research process are jiapu and zupu, which contain records of generational relationships, clan histories, origins, renowned members, and so on. These primary sources are kept in the lineage halls and ancestral temples or are scattered around family homes in the villages, and most of these are not archived in public institutions or maintained by any public authority. Some family records have vanished due to natural disasters, wars, or intentional destruction. Human-induced destruction has left uneven genealogical records across China. For example, family records are preserved far better in the south, as this area is geographically farther from the political center and thus suffered less destruction during the CR. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was also a revival of genealogical research, especially in the south. People started working together to preserve their local heritage and update their family records, and they were especially actively in doing so in Southern China. This movement led to new editions of old genealogical records, which was the result of collective village efforts to restore family histories.

Influenced by its Western counterparts, My China Roots has started to construct an online database that includes jiapu/zupu, cemetery records, altar tablets, Chinese Overseas Association membership records, gazetteers, and remittance letters (see Figure 1). The company has also started building (sur)name and village databases, focusing on Fujian Province and Guangdong Province, and allowing overseas Chinese to start tracing their roots online. Most databases will be available to the public in some form unless there are specific requirements related to copyrights or privacy issues. The goal is for most databases to be freely available to the public, although the management of data (i.e., saving, sharing, curating, and expanding the data) will require some form of payment. This goal, that is, to allow the overseas Chinese individuals worldwide to connect with their roots and to make China’s rich culture and history come alive through an online platform that is specifically designed for people who were not born and raised in China, is ambitious. The estimated primary target market, which is approximately two million people, is located in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, with ancestral origins in Guangdong and Fujian. The database construction and the corresponding app building are privately funded. ²⁷ This work extends beyond digitizing and archiving current family records, as many libraries and archives are already working on this task across China. The online database, the app, and a virtual interface developed by My China Roots boast further potential for curating a public space for family genealogy in China.

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Figure 1.

Online Roots Quest; www.mychinaroots.com.

The Museum of Family Letters represents another impressive case. The family letter, jiashu, appeared approximately during the West Han period (206 BC–25 AD), with the meaning of letters stored in the family instead of family letters. It was in the Three Kingdom period (220 AD–280 AD) that the family letter acquired its modern implication, referring to correspondence among family members. Jiaxin, Jiayan, Jiaxun, Zhubao, Jiabao, and Yuhan, and so on are all associated with this private and emotional connotation.

The Commentary of Zuo recorded the earliest family letters. As parts of official correspondence, these letters had very little similar implications to modern family letters. During the Warring State period (475 BC–221 BC), family letters became a tool for communicating among family members and moved from the public to the private sphere. The invention of paper during the West Han period had a profound impact on the evolution of family letters. The literary elites attached great importance to writing family letters as literary creations. ²⁸

Family letter writing has developed in both content and style since the Weijin period. The letters discuss a wide range of matters from significant national events to quotidian happenings. A new rhythmic and orate prose style characterized by parallelism and allusions, pianwen, appeared and influenced family letter writing. Family letters acquired an aesthetic dimension and became a form of art. The Tang and Song periods witnessed the apogee of prose writing, gradually leaning toward, or returning to, a style of simplicity, that is, expression in the most concise and precise yet lyrical prose. Family letters have matured into a delicate combination of history, literature, archives, communication, etiquette, calligraphy, and art; family letters are the precious material culture of traditional Chinese philosophy, morality, ethics, and rituals. ²⁹ During the Ming and Qing periods (1368 AD–1840 AD), with the tightening control of the autocratic regime, family letters provided space for intimate and private correspondence. During the People’s Republic era (1912–1949), the political use of family letters often led the government to continue drawing upon the ancient glory, including memories of traditional ethics, patriotism, and family education and communication. After 1949, most known family letters were restricted to the most powerful and the most educated and currently remain largely in private hands. Civilian family letters, or family letters written by ordinary people, are generally dismissed as having a “lack of historical significance.”

When the Museum of Family Letters was established at Renmin University in Beijing in 2016, the founder broke the ground. His vision was simple and elegant as follows: “The authors of many family letters are witnesses to a particular time, and their perspectives are often missing in official historical records. Civilian family letters primarily concern lives of ordinary people and history of ordinary families.” ³⁰ Starting in 2005 as an outcome of a national effort by a groups of cultural elites to salvage family letters scattered outside the official archives, the museum since has acquired a populist tone dovetailing with its humble origin. After going through waves of financial stresses and rounds of negotiations, the museum finally found a home in one of the most prestigious universities in China. The first exhibit, “Open the Sealed Memory: the Civilian Family Letters in China,” opened in 2009, and some 40,000 family letters entered Renmin University, their institutional home. In 2012, another exhibit, “The Beauty of Family Letters,” followed and presented approximately 1,000 family letters in the newly established museum space at the university (see Figure 2). While family letters are not new to Chinese culture, in this case, it is extraordinary that what used to belong to the private space now resides in the public domain.

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Figure 2.

An Exibit of Chinese Family Letters. Photo credit: Na Li, October 19, 2018.

These letters record personal narratives and family stories. Analyzed collectively, the letters provide fresh insights into broader social changes. For example, Han Rongzhang, a businessman from Shanxi Province, wrote on June 30, 1900, about the Boxer uprising in Beijing from a civilian perspective, complementing the official records. Another series of letters written by a businessman from Maolin County in Anhui Province and dated around 1940 described how the war afflicted their tea business and everyday lives. Another example is the family letters written by Zhang Faxu, a peasant from south Shanxi Province with merely half a year of formal education. In his family letter dated on December 17, 1989, he described his first flying experience with a somewhat choppy and humorous tone in which the thrilling joy of gratification mingles with a sanguine expectation for a brighter future and surfaces so naturally. He sent a telegram upon his arrival to his son with the following six words: “Arrived safe and happily” (see Figures 3 and 4). What an appropriate and emotional six words! We catch a glimpse of how Chinese peasants enjoyed an improved living standard after the reform-and-open policy beginning in the early 1980s.

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Figure 3.

Family letter of Zhang Faxu, dated December 17, 1989. Source: The Museum of Family Letters archive.

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Figure 4.

Family letter of Zhang Faxu, dated December 17, 1989. Source: The Museum of Family Letters archive.

With a strong focus on civilian family letters, the museum demonstrated the power of storytelling in ordinary families. In the museum, personal narratives and family memories became a type of public history, for example, the anti-Japanese war family letter series showcase how family letters can carry a strong hint of national memory. A letter dated December 27, 1941, when the Japanese initiated another fierce attack on the city of Changsha in Hunan Province immediately after the Pearl Harbor strike, was written by Sergeant Chu Dinghou, who led the Communist platoon to fight against the Japanese army. The handwriting revealed an unflinching determination to die for his country. He quoted inspirations from ancient role models as follows: “Rarely has one returned from the battles since ancient times” ³¹ (see Figures 5 and 6). Inspired by the sergeant, some 1,500 family letters were written expressing the writers’ strong determination to die for their country. The letters were laced with some intimate details such as how much they would love to stay with their wives and raise their young children, yet all were driven by a noble cause, and some encouraged their wives to join the communist party and contribute to the war. The boundary between one’s family and one’s nation blurred. The national history was melted into intimate family letters by many ordinary Chinese, even though these ordinary people became nameless during the war and were never mentioned in any of the official history textbooks.

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Figure 5.

The letter from Chu Dinghou, stating “rarely one returns from the battles since the ancient times (gu lai zheng zhan ji ren hui).”

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Figure 6.

The envelop used by Chu Dinghou to his brother Chu Dinghao (zi jin shen). Source: The Museum of Family Letters archive.

For a public institution to survive censorship, it has to work with rather than against the political climate. Both selection and presentation are managed carefully. Even current communist regime takes advantage of such lofty endeavors as sacrificing one’s family for a grander national goal. The regime reinterprets ancient historical traditions for its own contemporary use; for example, the exhibitions at the Museum of Family Letters blend pride about the ancient civilization into a patriotic dream of China, which seems another banal attempt. However, if one reads close enough, the lofty ideals, expressed in the crafted letterheads, envelopes, and dutifully repeated slogans such as “long live Chairman Mao,” fade into the background, while intimate conversations about quotidian life reveal very raw human emotions.

Despite the impressive scale of the collections at the museum, most letters are presented with scant interpretation, and visitors must probe, question, and interpret. The question of how family letters work in a carefully crafted, dialogic space remains vague. How to work with the vast amount of family letter data offering some exciting glimpses into the past and produce works with intellectual weight that satisfy the popular thirst for the past poses another challenge. The next logical step seems to be acquiring funds to digitize the collections, builds digital database, and more promisingly generates archives available to the inspired public.

Family Stories and Public History: A Critical Analysis

The dynamic and diverse practices of family history occur in a gradually expanding public space that is both physical and virtual. If the desire to return to the beginning, as falling leaves returning to their roots, to restore an unbroken continuity has always been a part of Chinese ancient philosophy, the expanded inquiry has clearly evoked a new genealogical imagination. Why this sudden surge of enthusiasm about family history from the very bottom of the social totem pole? Why are ordinary people becoming increasingly interested in collecting material culture, interviewing family members, constructing genealogies, writing biographies, tracing genetic-related evidence, and preserving all sorts of family records as archival memories? We cannot clearly explain the massive appeal of family history by measuring it against the current framework and methods of analysis. Ideas such as roots, attachment, kinship, identity, and even the very concept of family invite further thoughts. Certain assumptions need to be reconsidered in some historical depth.

The practices of a surprising variety represent a collective yearning for roots and identities, for returning to the beginning to establish an impossible certainty in a constantly shifting world. The practices also reveal an epistemological anxiety over truth, order, and understanding. In this massive rush for a return to, memory sometimes joins history to navigate through the quest for the past, while at other times, memory competes with history in claiming the territory of the past; according to Tim Brennan, “The interpretation of the past is not necessarily regarded as full-blown history. The past in question exists on a much smaller scale.” ⁴³ In this revived interest in the ancient ideal and the aspiration to find one’s roots, the seemingly rigid boundary between history and memory becomes relaxed and fluid. Equally startlingly is the gradually blurring line between the private and the public. Thus, we witness personal stories, narratives, and histories morph into a type of public memory. The space-annihilating collective remembering crosses generations, and at a modest scale, it gives personal lives a meaning and significance that the traditional family history has ignored.

The motivations driving the current wave of family history vary, and the most direct one is the social disintegration of the communist ideology, a popular disillusionment with state power. Since the late nineteenth century, we have witnessed the weakening of patriarchal authority, the gradual disappearance of large, elite households, the rise of the nuclear family, the increasing emphasis on love and mutual affection between spouses, and attention to the nurturing and education of children. ⁴⁴ These dramatic social changes have been accompanied by political intervention into the ownership of the land, basic birth rights, and burial practices. The infamous one-child-per-couple policy, which started in 1979, denied a woman’s right to give birth to more than one child and had a five RMB per month financial incentive. Alarmed by the rapid decline in the working population, the government has gradually relaxed the policy since 2016, but the policy has irrevocably impacted population growth and demographic distributions. ⁴⁵ Currently, China has entered the modern pattern of population reproduction manifested by low birth rates, low death rates, low growth rates, lower total fertility rates, and late marriage. As its current total fertility rate has decreased to 1.18 percent, China has an ultralow birth rates compared to other countries in the region and with the lowest-low fertility countries. ⁴⁶

Take the recent battle over burial practices as another example. The Chinese government has had a long history of discouraging people from burying their dead. The reformers in the People’s Republic advocated for cremation, claiming that it symbolized modernity. A more recent effort to force the people to break with ancient burial rituals is backed by a more practical concern. The government believes that burial practices and mourning rituals could result in arable land becoming even scarcer, thus impairing China’s ability to feed its rapidly growing population. However, for many Chinese people, keeping the body intact epitomizes respect for one’s ancestors and is thus an inseparable part of family history and identity. Almost forty years ago, James Rhoads quoted John Gardner in discussing the importance of family history as follows: “All experience shows that our shared values survive best in coherent human groups—the family, the neighbourhood, the community.” ⁴⁷ When the government stepped-up antiburial practices by setting cremation rate targets for selected areas and promoting ecoburials starting in 2012, some of the most basic connections and shared values of ordinary families were ruthlessly cut out.

As previously discussed, during the revolutionary period, the ordinary Chinese people were mobilized by the lofty ideal of sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. Currently, the quest for roots occurs on a much smaller scale in a drastically different context. To better understand these practices, we need to connect family history with larger social structures and processes. In Charles Tilly’s brilliant summary about the goals of social history, family history is only one part along with reconstitution and connection. On the one hand, social historians seek to reconstitute a complete picture of life as people lived it; on the other hand, historians also try to connect life on the small scale with large social structures and processes. Tilly wrote some thirty years ago that, “properly pursued, family history based on collective biography can greatly strengthen our analyses of large-scale social change. It can serve as an exemplar for the study of large-scale social change, as a direct contribution to that study, and as a challenge to its improvement.” ⁴⁸ Without establishing a causal relationship, family history studies could “produce many bright fragments of dubious comparability and uncertain relationship,” and thus, according to Tilly’s analysis, “will miss the opportunity to address, criticize, and modify general conceptions of historical development.” ⁴⁹

The search for roots, for origin, for connection, for attachment, and for identity is but still loosely associated with the nation and large-scale social changes. Family history needs to step beyond reconstructing people’s lives. It should connect with social changes to contribute to our historical understanding. With a focus on practice, or in various disguises, actions, activities, praxes, experiences, and performances, we situate family history with a broader social and public history and addresses the whys and hows of human actions and interactions. Sharing with the structuralist view the belief that the system affects families in a powerful manner, a practice-oriented approach emphasizes the actual assessment of ordinary people’s experiences. Probing how those experiences interact with larger structural changes in society, we face two specific challenges. First, content-wise, a vast amount of information, censored or otherwise, has gone far beyond physically or politically imposed boundaries. Big family data redefine the very idea of family, suggest a fresh approach to family history, and, consequently, challenge the traditional sense of selfhood and family identity. Digitized historical sources have broken that hierarchical authority. Second, the physical transmission of narratives down across generations reveals a mounting sense of intrigue for continuity and connection. In this spirit, family historians will have to become more receptive to new sources and methodologies, such as social–scientific approaches, measurements, and analyses. Family historians also need to engage in the cross-pollination of research collaborations and to explore the creation of more accessible forms of history—in a form of public history.

Conclusion

Currently, with the help of the Internet, millions of ordinary Chinese people have engaged in researching, writing, and presenting their family histories. Family history has become a cultural phenomenon that refuses to be pigeonholed, proudly flaunts its lack of disciplinary boundaries, and, most importantly, directly contributes to our understanding of historical and social changes. The eclectic nature of the research, the human-scaled writing style, and the innovative styles of presentation all indicate that family history in China is now at a crossroads. When historians criticize the products of this family history research as messy, unpolished, and emotionally driven, they miss the bigger picture: not only the intellectual quality of the research but also the scale and depth of the research merit serious attention. Accuracy is but a part of the equation; identity, not merely pedigree, counts. If, in previous times, officials and scholars constructed genealogies for a narrow association with the state or with power, genealogy has now become family history, which has been an agent for root seeking and identity building. The growing demand for genealogical information and products will soon stimulate the family history market. How to play a professional and responsible role in this gradual but definite transformation poses an exciting challenge for a new generation of public historians in China.

Glossary (Chinese Characters)

cheng yi 诚意

citang 祠堂

DaXue 《大学》

ge wu 格物

Gu lai zheng zhan ji ren hui 古来征战几人回

guo 国

History of Qing Dynasty 《清史稿》

jia 家

jiapu 家谱

jiamiao 家庙

jiashu 家书

jiating 家庭

jiaxin 家信

jiazu 家族

jin zong shou zu 敬宗收族

Junguomiao 郡国庙

ming ming de 明明德

pian wen 骈文

ping tian xia 平天下

qi jia 齐家

ShiBen《世本》

SiShu《四书》

The Commentary of Zuo《左传》

The Twenty-Four Histories《二十四史》

tu 土

xing 行

xiu shen 修身

ying 阴

yang 阳

zheng xin 正心

zhi zhi 致知

zhi guo 治国

zhiyuzhishan 止于至善

ZhouLi《周礼》

ZhouQin Schools of Thought《周秦诸子》

zong 宗

zongzhu 宗主

zongmiao 宗庙

zu 族(簇)

zupu 族谱