Clan Organizations And Rural Construction

Clans have gradually revived and developed in majority of rural society since 1980s. Now that a fashion of repairing and rebuilding ancestral halls is rising up with the revival of clans, lineage organizations become a force to be reckoned with in the modern rural society by holding public events like repairing ancestral halls, finally reaching goals to unite and harmonize the clans, to form identification among clan members and to promote their own development. In a sense, as the foundation of clans, ancestral halls have already become the most important core symbol of the modern clan culture and are of great significance to the revival and development of clans, directly reflecting the cohesion of clan strength, the maintenance of clans'common interests and the promotion of clan strength's revival as well as development. By means of building ancestral halls and thus uniting the identification of clan members, the lineage organizations, as a body, influence rural construction, especially village autonomy.Lineage organizations'influence on rural construction falls into two aspects:the positive influence and the negative one. Under certain conditions, lineage organizations contribute to the development of village autonomy; however, the influence turns out to be negative in the end, in terms of the lineage organizations'nature. First, lineage organizations keep the "two committees" of villages and village autonomy system from performing their functions effectively, hindering the construction of democratic politics in villages. Secondly, under control of lineage organizations, the long-formed, relatively balanced and stable distribution pattern of village officials between each natural village as well as fiction of clan will be broken in village autonomy, weakening the authority of village officials and the efficacy of the "two committees". Third, lineage organizations are of disadvantage to the formation of the rural law ruling society, harming the security of the rural society. Fourth, the closure and conservatism of clans impede the development of rural economy. Fifth, the long-formed conventional thoughts of clans are somewhat harmful to the socialist cultural and ethical progress. With the development of socialist productive forces, the overall promotion of spiritual civilization and the perfection of sound and law-based village autonomy, lineage organizations and clan culture are bound to extinct.As precious cultural heritage of Zhejiang Province and generally recognized by workers of cultural heritage preservation from home and abroad, thousands of ancestral halls dating back to Ming or Qing Dynasty are regarded as the most outstanding representatives of vernacular architecture, possessing high values in history, art and culture. Though the social function of ancestral halls is closely related to lineage organizations, their values are still important as cultural heritage, instead of vanishing with the extinction of lineage organizations and clan culture. In the modern rural society, when we are exploring policy proposals related with lineage organizations in order to promote rural construction, we should refer to the actual situation of the existence of ancestral halls and try to come up with proposals which can not only promote village autonomy and the construction of new socialist law-based countryside, but also help protect important existing ancestral halls scientifically.