Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores conceptual frameworks for dynamics of family, ethnicity, and nation-state in Chinese society and clarifies the mechanism of continuity and discontinuity of Chinese culture from historical and global perspectives. It presents a comparative study on families among the Han Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese societies, using both cultural and functional paradigms based on long-term fieldwork within East Asia. The chapter argues against functional ignorance of native Chinese ideas of kinship and for the continuous relevance of the cultural paradigm in understanding the functional actualization of the cultural paradigm in the everyday life of Chinese societies. It shows the "revival of Confucianism" in China, which had been furiously criticized as the root of feudalism and an obstacle of modernity since the early twentieth century and emphasizes the complexity of the local politics within the Hui ethnic minority in China.