Ling Tan raised his head. He heard his wife's high voice coming over the rice field where he stood up to his knees in water. Why should the woman call him now in mid-afternoon when it was not time to eat or to sleep? In a far comer of the field his two sons were bending over the water, their two right arms thrusting together like the arms of one man as they planted the rice seedlings.
Pearl S. Buck depicts this scene of a typical Chinese farm family of late 1930s in the beginning of Dragon Seed, a 1942 novel about the family's love for their land and their philosophy of life. The Chinese family life illustrated in this scene in fact remained almost the same for several thousand years, because China was always an agricultural society. Ethics, therefore, reflected this predominant way of life.
The Chinese family system is based on Confucian teachings that integrate moral principles and the patriarchal clan system set up by the Duke of Chou, brother of Emperor Wu, who was the first ruler of the Chou Dynasty (1122-221 B.C.). Traditionally, the family was considered an important unit linking individuals with the state. The principle set up in The Great Learning, one of the ancient Four Books, that only when families were regulated could state affairs be well managed clearly reveals the centrality of family functions in the Chinese way of thinking. Such Confucian ideas created a society that placed high value on human relationships. Three of the wu lun (the five human relationships between sovereign and subjects, father and sons, husband and wife, among brothers, and between friends) focus on relations within the family. People were therefore judged by whether they showed filial piety or devotion to their parents.
The Chinese kinship system always placed heavy emphasis on the importance of the male and on the relationship traced through the male line, even though occasionally a woman with exceptionally strong personality could raise herself above her allotted status. Women, treated as of little importance, were considered to be there to serve the male and to provide continuity of the family line. A female was required to obey her father before marriage, her husband during married life, and her sons in widowhood.
The extended family, a very difficult group to hold together and a strong tradition in this ancient Asian culture, often endured conflicts among brothers, cousins, wives of the younger generation, and other members of the big family clan. Although the traditional Chinese family system was seriously attacked in the late Ching Dynasty and early Republic as Western influences gradually reached China, there was no fundamental reform in the system itself. Only during the last four decades has the Chinese family, especially in Taiwan, under gone vital changes.
Rapid economic development, industrialization, urbanization, and equal educational opportunities all have contributed to changes in the structure and life of the Chinese family, causing a hybrid form to emerge in contemporary society. In the past, formal education only prepared men for official positions, positions not open to women. Since their duties were confined to the home, education was considered unnecessary for women. But women in Taiwan have now been given an equal access to knowledge, which enables them to enter the labor force or the professional world, and they are doing so with amazing rapidity.
Modern education and social change have also weakened the father's authority. In a traditional Chinese family, the father exercised supreme authority through his contribution to the family's income. Now, the younger generation, both male and female, shoulders the economic responsibilities for their families, a change that has exerted considerable pressures on earlier family traditions.
While anthropologists are still arguing about the actual size of the traditional Chinese family, records show that families with "five generations living under the same roof' did exist and were publicly praised at least as far back as the Tang Dynasty, more than a thousand years ago. Nevertheless, large extended families were relatively rare in ancient China. A five-generation family was only an ideal in the minds of the Chinese people, and it seemed confined only to the wealthy.
About 54 percent of the households in Taiwan today are nuclear families, or two-generation families. To avoid conflicts in a big family, young couples now prefer organizing a small household of their own rather than living with the husband's family. With the shrinkage of traditional family size, the modern Chinese family has already lost many of its earlier characteristics. The nuclear family attaches more importance to rearing the young than to taking care of the old. And in an era with medical advancement, most people live longer, which has far-reaching effects on family relationships. The old have to make a certain degree of adjustment, although a great majority of them are afraid they may have to live the rest of their lives in nursing homes.
A recent survey shows 5.4 percent of Taiwan's 1987 population was over 65 years old. By the year 2000, the percent age will increase to 8.4, ranking Taiwan as an "advanced-age" society. Although most of the young people prefer the two generation nuclear family, sociologists advocate the stem family system—a nuclear family along with older parents of either the young husband or the young wife. In such a household, grand parents share the burden of the working couple by being actively involved in the upbringing of their grandchildren. The government is even considering the possibility of encouraging people to have their old parents live with them by reducing their tax burdens.
In spite of the increasing problems derived from rapid social change, such as a higher divorce rate and social welfare for the aged, a recent survey by the local Global Views Monthly shows that 66 percent of the 500 respondents, 30-40 years old, believe that pursuing a happy family life is the main goal of their efforts. This indicates that despite the sweeping changes brought to Chinese family life, traditional attitudes are surviving, albeit in hybrid form. It remains to be seen, however, how effectively they will adapt to the continuing momentum of urbanization and family fragmentation that is part of the modernization process.