Kinship is an important feature of all human societies. However, Chinese kinship is exceptionally robust. During the early periods of Chinese civilization, kinship was integrated into the political system. Clearly by the late Shang (c. 1250-1050 BC), and most likely much earlier, access to power and wealth was regulated by a kin-based system. This system continued to structure the Chinese society until the modern times.
All civilizations used ritual, especially religious ritual, to legitimate and maintain social order. However, ritual in Chinese civilization is remarkably secular. Although sacrifice to heaven and earth was seen as an obligation of the state to maintain the cosmological order, the most frequently practiced ritual was offerings to the ancestors. In fact, ancestral ritual in Chinese civilization was an apparatus to maintain the kinship system and thus the social order.
Writing is a symbol system that enables communication in the absence of face-to-face interaction. Messages and memories can be stored and retrieved across space and through time. Although writing seems to have emerged in the Longshan era of the third millennium BC, examples have been found in small numbers only and are not yet deciphered; indicating that they have no connection to modern Chinese writing. On the contrary, the writing of late Shang by the end of the second millennium BC was immediately deciphered after its discovery, because the writing system of modern Chinese is its direct descen-dent. The continuity of a writing system, in effect, sustained the development of lineage organization and ritual institutions. Wealthy lineages compiled gen-eology books to precisely specify their relations through patrilines. In any particular time, people could refer to the ideal forms of ritual advocated by Confucianism, which had been elevated to the stature of state ideology since the second century BC. These gave rise to a unique feature of Chinese civilization: an uninterrupted civilization from the first day of its formation to the modern era (see Writing Systems).
World History
