Page:Chinese Characteristics.djvu/256



NE of the most distinctive features of Chinese society is that which is epitomised in the word "responsibility," a word which carries with it a significance and embraces a wealth of meaning to which Western lands are total strangers. In those lands, as we well know, the individual is the unit and the nation is a large collection of individuals. In China the unit of social life is found in the family, the village, or the clan, and these are often convertible terms. Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively persons having the same surname and the same ancestors. The inhabitants have lived in the same spot ever since they began to live at all, and trace an unbroken descent for many hundred years back to the last great political upheaval, such as the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty or its establishment. In such a village there can be no relationship laterally more distant than "cousin," and every male member of an older generation is either a father, an uncle, or some kind of a "grandfather." Sometimes eleven generations are represented in the same small hamlet. This does not imply, as might be supposed, extreme old age on the part of any representative of the older generations. The Chinese marry young, marry repeatedly, often late in life, and constantly adopt children. The result is such a tangle among relatives that without special inquiry and minute attention to the particular characters which are employed in writing the names of all who belong to the same "generation," it is