Chinese kinship
It maintains a specific designation for almost every member's kin based on their generation, lineage, relative age, and gender.
The traditional system was agnatic, based on patriarchal power, patrilocal residence, and descent through the male line.
[4][5] In traditional Chinese thought, these relationships carry extensive rights and duties whose fulfilment that constituted both righteousness (yi, 義) and propriety (li, 禮).
Fulfilment of these duties constituted the principal Chinese virtue - filial piety (xiao, 孝).
[3] Family members expect to be addressed by the correct term that indicated their relationship to the person communicating with them.
[3] In all places and times, Chinese mourning behavior is calibrated according to the genealogical distance between the mourner and the deceased.
Another lexicon from the late Han dynasty, Shiming, has a detailed list of forms of address for all relatives.
One of the Confucian teachings is filial piety, which it is extended to a series of five relationships known as the Five Cardinal Relationships (五倫),[7] three of which are related to the family: In the Three Character Classic, the nine agnates are listed in the following stanza: In Chinese culture where the extended family is still valued, kinship terms have survived well into current usage.
When there are many siblings as in many Post–World War II baby-boom families, the relation is distinguished and addressed according to age or rank.
[8] Translating kinship terms from other languages often presents the problem of ambiguity as there is no equivalent general term for when the relationship is unspecified (such as if an English speaker mentions their aunt or uncle without specifying which relationship their aunt or uncle is to their family) Despite the complexity of the kinship address system (see terminology section below), it is common to simplify it for the sake of familiarity.
The Great Qing Legal Code (大清律例) was the last set of Chinese laws where the complete kinship terms were shown.
Although there was no specific statute in the Qing code to define kinship terms, it specified the mourning attire and ritual appropriate according to the relation between the mourner and the deceased.
During this period, the bereaved had to stay at home, excuse himself from public service, refrain from celebrations of all sorts, and practice abstinence, among other things.
The "extermination of nine kindreds" (誅九族) is considered one of the most severe punishments found in traditional Chinese law enforced until the end of Qing.
In addition to the blood relations from his nine-agnates family hierarchy, his students and peers were added to be the tenth group.
To this day, a three-character term (冚家鏟) for "death to the entire family" remains a powerful profanity in the Cantonese language.
For those who could afford a bride price and support a family of multiple concubines and children, polygyny provided a better chance of issuing heirs.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China by the Chinese Communists on the mainland, this banning was reaffirmed in the passage of the Marriage Code of 1950.
There is a phenomenon of cross-border polygyny usually involving Hong Kong men and their mistresses living in Mainland China.
The People's Republic of China introduced its One-child policy in 1979, and The Family Planning Association of Hong Kong began its "Two is enough!"
[citation needed] A product of rising divorce rates in Chinese societies is the breakdown of the traditionally close-knit kinship relation.
[citation needed] The "nine grades of relations" (九族) is an important concept when it comes to application of laws and observing rituals.
This interpretation was cited in Part III Chapter 2 of Lewis Henry Morgan's 1877 book Ancient Societies.
Conventionally, clans adopted the five degrees of mourning according to unwritten definitions that determines the difference between close and distant relatives.
The five degrees of mourning attire in decreasing order of severity are: This section covers members and their spouses in the immediate and extended family that is commonly found in the first nine corner cells on the table of consanguinity or cousin chart (from ego to grandparents on the rows and columns).
The degrees of mourning attire are included as an indication of how close the relation is to ego and what level of respect is expected.
This section covers members and their spouses found beyond the first nine corner cells on the table of consanguinity or cousin chart.
Other than some of the relations mentioned in the previous sections that are not covered under the five degrees of mourning attire, the following are kin that are also considered distant.
外 - prefix for maternal line relations; essentially anyone not sharing the same surname as ego The following familial relationship suggests partial or no consanguinity.
