The Rise of the Chinese Clan
by James Kung
Abstract: Regarded as a morally particularistic institution favoring economic exchange or interactions between parties of known identities, the Chinese clan – bonded together by lineages related to a common ancestor – arguably held back the economic progress of China. Yet, the ancestral hall – a hallmark of this centuries-old, kin-based institution – has not been systematically compiled. To gauge its growth both over time and across space, we digitized 4,500 county gazetteers across all of China for a period of nearly 800 years (c. 1136-1935). We find that the vast majority of the 18,685 ancestral halls (98.7%) enumerated were only built after 1536 – when Emperor Jiajing permitted commoners and low-ranking officials alike to build ancestral halls (the Ritual Reform). By exploiting the exogenous variation both in time (using 1536 as cutoff) and across space (where counties are differentiated by their suitability to cultivate rice as a proxy for the crop’s irrigation needs which clan organization helps facilitate), we find, using a DID design, that most ancestral halls were built after the reform, and predominantly in the rice-growing counties. A counterfactual analysis finds that the Ritual Reform accounts for 24% and 14% of the observed growth in respectively the number and probability of ancestral halls constructed between 1436 and 1836. Regarding channels, we find that commoners rather than officials were the primary force behind the construction of ancestral halls, and in regions where the demand for irrigation projects was significantly greater.