The social structure of China has an expansive history which begins from the feudal society of Imperial China to the contemporary era. There was a Chinese nobility, beginning with the Zhou dynasty. However, after the Song dynasty, the powerful government offices were not hereditary. Instead, they were selected through the imperial examination system, of written examinations based on Confucian thought, thereby undermining the power of the hereditary aristocracy.
Imperial China divided its society into four occupations or classes, with the emperor ruling over them. Throughout this time period, there were attempts to eradicate this system. Social mobility was difficult, or sometimes nearly impossible, to achieve as social class was primarily defined by an individual's identity. To rise required passing a very difficult written exam. The great majority failed, but for those who passed their entire family rose in status.
During the Song dynasty, there was a clear division in social structure which was enforced by law. However, commoners could move up in society through the acquirement of wealth. Through passing the imperial exam or donating resources, people could enter the gentry. By the Yuan dynasty, there was a decrease in protection by the law for commoners. The gentry, however, were given more privileges. The Yuan dynasty also saw an increase in slavery, as the slave status became hereditary. The new policy for commoners at this time also made the various categories within the commoner status hereditary. The Ming dynasty saw a decrease in the number of categories for commoners, in comparison to the policy implemented during the Yuan dynasty. The three categories that remained were hereditary, making it nearly impossible to move between them. Gentry was also divided into two types. By the Qing dynasty, the peasants were seen as the most respected class. Merchants were far lower in status unless they purchased gentry status.
During reform and opening up from 1978, the social structure in the country underwent many changes as the working class began to increase significantly. In 21st-century China, social structure is more reliant on employment and education, which allows citizens to have more social mobility and freedoms.
Confucianism
The teaching of Confucius (551 BCE – 479 BCE) taught of five basic relationships in life: Father to son Older sibling to younger sibling Husband to wife Friend to friend Ruler to structure
For dynasties that used Confucianism (not Legalism), the first noted in the relationship was always superior and had to act as a guide and leader/role model to the second noted , as the second person was to follow. For example: Father, 1st noted; Son, 2nd noted.
In the Confucian view of the economy, agricultural work was morally superior. The point was work was the embodiment of a social contract. The emperor and his officials worked to ensure the welfare of the people (or "min") envisaged as peasant families. The male miners worked in the fields to produce grain for their own food and for taxes; their wives made clothing for everyone. Agriculture was thus fundamental. Crafts and trade were secondary, and typically pernicious by diverting productive labor and promoting extravagance.
Early Imperial Period From the Qin dynasty to the late Qing dynasty (221 BCE – 1840 CE), the Chinese government divided Chinese people into four classes: landlord, peasant, craftsmen, and merchant. Landlords and peasants constituted the two major classes, while merchants and craftsmen were collected into the two minor. Theoretically, except for the position of the Emperor, nothing was hereditary.
During the 361 years of civil war after the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), there was a partial restoration of feudalism when wealthy and powerful families emerged with large amounts of land and huge numbers of semi-serfs. They dominated important civilian and military positions of the government, making the positions available to members of their own families and clans.The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13, 30 The Tang dynasty extended the Imperial examination system as an attempt to eradicate this feudalism.
The Tang and the Song dynasty saw a major transition in the composition of China's ruling elites. From the Han through the Tang, official posts filled by an aristocratic network of several hundred intermarried families based in the capital. Many of them were prominent for 500 years or more, far longer than European feudal dynasties. From the Song on, however, official posts were usually filled by a much larger but less cohesive class of gentry who married and owned property in their home provinces and who rose to prominence through the examination system. Scholarly explanations for the demise of the old class and the rise of the new include Empress Wu's decision to promote newly risen bureaucrats, reforms that followed the An Lushan rebellion, the destruction of aristocratic families in the Huang Chao rebellion, and decisions taken by the families themselves in the Song dynasty to build up local power bases.
Song dynasty
During the Song dynasty social strata were clearly divided and enforced by the law. At the bottom of the pyramid were the commoners, who were categorized into two groups: (city dwellers) and (rural population). and had ranks. The first rank, commoners (both and ), were the wealthiest. The ranks of commoners could change over time, as one who acquired more wealth could be promoted to a higher rank.
On the other hand, gentry and government officials were not commoners. They and their families belong to (gentry). was not an exclusive social stratum like European nobility; by participating and passing the imperial exam, one could be qualified as a member of . In addition, relatives of a government official can become through the system of . In some rarer cases, a commoner could become by donating a large amount of money, grain, or industrial materials to the imperial court. In 1006, accounted for 1.3% of the entire population. The percentage of increased to 2.8% by the year 1190. The growing population of was partly due to the system of which allowed a relatively easy entry into the stratum of .
At the top of the social pyramid was the royal house of the Song dynasty. The royal house consists of the Emperor, Empress, concubines, princes, and princesses. The royal house enjoys the highest quality of life with everything provided by other social strata. With imperial fields (fields that were owned by the emperor), the basic food supplies of the royal house were satisfied. Luxury items in the imperial court also had their sources. Tea, for example, was provided by the imperial tea plantation. Annually, local products from various regions of China were paid as tributes to the royal house.
During the Song dynasty, slave trading was forbidden and punished by law. However, slavery was not entirely absent from the history of the Song dynasty. To some extent, there were slave traders who illegally kidnapped commoners and sold them as slaves. Criminals were sometimes converted to slaves by the government. However, traditional slavery was not a common practice during the Song dynasty. Servants of the wealthy gentry usually kept a contract-like relationship with the lords served.Wang p.501
In reality, the Song society's structure had evolved and changed over time. After the Jingkang incident, the phenomenon of land annexation became increasingly obvious. By land annexation, the wealthy commoners and government officials privatized lands that were public or owned by poorer people. In the late Song dynasty, the society's two ends were polarized. Wealthy landowners devoured most of the cultivable lands, leaving others in extreme poverty. Even the imperial court's profit was curbed. Taxation was illegally avoided by wealthy landowners and the court eventually found itself collecting much less amount of taxes than ever before. Xie Fangshu, an investigating censor famously described the situation as "The flesh of the poor ones becomes the food of the strong ones" (弱肉强食).
Jurchen Empire The Jurchen Jin dynasty coexisted with the Song dynasty after the Jingkang incident. The Jurchen Empire ruled the northern part of China. Under the Jurchen rule, the conventional code Begile was introduced. Under this code, an emperor and his courtiers were equal. Emperor Xizong of Jin reformed the empire's legal system and abolished the Begile during the reform of Tianjuan. The reform eliminated the aboriginal Jurchen conventions and substituted them with the conventions of the Song and Liao dynasties. During the Jin dynasty, Minggan Moumuke, groups of Jurchen soldiers who settled down in Northern China, changed their nomadic lifestyle to the agricultural lifestyle of Chinese commoners.
Yuan dynasty
Kublai, the founder of the Yuan dynasty, notably gave many financial privileges to the gentries of Jiangnan region. After the defeat of the Song dynasty by the Yuan, making friends with the local elites of Song became important. As a consequence, the most wealthy ones in the Song social strata remained wealthy in the Yuan dynasty.
Contrary to the situation of the gentry, commoners of the Yuan dynasty found themselves less protected by the law. Mongol rulers did not seem to make the interests of commoners a priority. A great number of ordinary farmers were converted to plantation workers working for the gentries. The wealthy entered upon the properties of commoners while making them essentially slave peasants.
The Mongols in the Yuan dynasty belonged to numerous clans. Tao Zongyi provided a list of the Mongol clans in his , later shown to be mistaken in various ways by the Japanese historian Yanai Watari. However, Tao's account was one of the few contemporary accounts of Mongols during the Yuan dynasty. The records and documents of the Yuan dynasty provide extremely limited information about the social strata of Mongols. Despite the lack of historical records, it is safe to say that Mongols enjoyed privileges that other ethnic groups did not. During their reign, the Mongols converted a large number of rice fields into pastures because agriculture was foreign to them. Both the government and Mongol nobles opened up pastures in China by taking the rice fields away from ordinary farmers.
Other social categories, including Semu, Hanren, and Nanren, existed under the rule of Mongols. Hanren refers to dwellers of Northern China, Korea, and Sichuan. Nanren refers to citizens of the Song dynasty (excluding people from Sichuan, although the region was a part of Song).
Yuan dynasty introduced the policy of Colored population statistics (). The policy divided commoners according to their occupation. Farmers, soldiers, craftsmen, hunters, physicians, messengers, and Confucian scholars are some of the categories under this policy. The farmers had the largest population among all the commoners in the Yuan dynasty. These categories are hereditary. One soldier will give birth to a son who will later become a soldier. In comparison with other commoners, craftsmen were treated more fairly since the Mongols deemed the skills of making weapons necessary for their conquest of the world. The Mongols routinely massacred Chinese civilians with the exception of Craftsmen.
Slavery was common during the Yuan dynasty. The main sources of slaves include captives,History of Yuan vol.119,120 criminals, kidnapped commoners, buying and selling of human lives. Slave status was also hereditary. A slave will give birth to slave children.;
Ming dynasty