China is by no means unique in considering the family important but the strong institutionalization of the family in traditional China culture would seem to have made families even more central in that society than in most.

Traditional Chinese beliefs, and values, and practice about families include:

The Ancestors

No ritual or institution did more to reinforce the solidarity of the family system in traditional Chinese society than ancestor veneration. Ancestral veneration in Chinese culture jìngza is the practice of living family members who try to provide a deceased family member with continuous happiness and well-being in the afterlife. It is a way of continuing to show respect towards them, and it reinforces the unity of family and lineage. Showing respect to ancestors is an ideology deeply rooted in Chinese society. It is based on the idea of filial piety or xiào put forth by Confucius. Filial piety is the concept of remaining loyal to parents as their child. It is believed that despite the death of a loved one, the original relationship remains intact, and that the deceased possess more spiritual power than they did during life.

It is thought that the soul of a deceased person is made up of yin and yang components. The yin component, po, is associated with the grave, and the yang component, hun, is associated with ancestral tablets. According to this belief, at death the components split into three different souls; the po goes with the body to the grave, one to judgment, and the hun resides in an ancestral tablet. The po and hun are not immortal and need to be nourished; it is the offerings that feed them. Eventually both the po and hun go to the underworld, although the hun goes to heaven first. Unlike in western usages of the term, underworld has no negative connotation. The state of ancestor veneration in modern day China is reported to be declining. However, in rural areas of China, as well as Taiwan, ancestor worship and its practices can still be commonly found.

Reverence was paid to ancestors, zuxian. For men this referred to his male ancestors and their wives. For a woman it referred two her male ancestors and their wives only a couple of generations up, but was extended also to all of her husband's male ancestors and their wives.

In popular belief ancestors are depended upon the living for this reverence and are usually seen as provisioning them with sacrificial food, literally feeding them. The failure to produce or adopt male offspring was considered an immoral behavior or a great misfortune. Those without male descendants to look after them tended to be thought of as potentially dangerous ghosts.

The Clan

A Chinese family is not a household as in the West. The Chinese household or Clan included whoever lived in the same building, which might mean tenants, servants, apprentices, sometimes a resident priest, or whoever.

Just as a household can incorporate people who are not part of the family, the family can incorporate people who are not part of the household. Many Chinese throughout history have lived for longer or shorter periods away from the families. Shorter separations might involve living during the summer in a small shed to protect fields from the theft of irrigation water, for example, or traveling over the countryside as a peddler. Longer separations might occur if a member went away to serve in the army or to study or to set up a business in another location.

The Patriarch

The traditional Chinese family or jia (colloquial: jiatíng), or the English translation of chia, was a patriarchal kinship group, descent was calculated through men. In China, a woman was quite explicitly removed from the family of her birth, her niángjia, and affiliated to her husband's family, her pójia. This transition was always very clearly symbolized in local marriage customs, despite their variation from one region to another.

The traditional Chinese family was hierarchically organized, with the prime institutionalized authority being vested in the senior-most male. No two members of a Chinese family were equal in authority. Family hierarchy was very emphatically symbolized in the concept of xiào (colloquial: xiàoshùn), which is usually translated "filial piety," but is more accurately rendered "filial subordination." Acts of heroic sacrifice in the support of one's parents are the commonest and most important genre of Chinese moral tales.

The Elders

The tradition of filial piety is the value of total respect for the family, especially the elders. This respect for elders was advocated by Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher and many Chinese and Chinese-American families choose to follow these ancient principles.

Traditionally, Chinese people do not pay a lot of attention to birthdays until they are 60 years old. The 60th birthday is regarded as a very important point of life and therefore there is often a big celebration. After that, a birthday celebration is held every ten years, that is the 70th, the 80th, etc, until the person's death. Generally, the older the person is, the greater the celebration occasion is.

The Chinese traditional way to count the age is different from the Western way. In China, people take the first day of the Chinese New Year in lunar calendar as the starting point of a new age. No matter in which month a child is born, he is one year old, and one more year is added to his age as soon as he enters the New Year. So what may puzzle a Westerner is that a child is two years old when he is actually two days or two hours old. This is possible when the child is born on the last day or hour of the past year.

It is often the grownup sons and daughters who celebrate their elderly parents' birthdays to show their respect for them and express their thanks for what they have done for their children. According to the traditional customs, the parents are offered foods with happy symbolic implications. On the birthday morning the father or mother will eat a bowl of long "long-life noodles." In China long noodles symbolize a long life. Eggs are also among the best choices of food taken on the special occasion.

To make the occasion grand, other relatives and friends are invited to the celebration. In Chinese culture, 60 years makes a cycle of a life and 61 is regarded as the beginning of a new life cycle. When one is 60 years old, he is expected to have a big family filled with children and grandchildren. It is an age to be proud of. That's why elderly people start to celebrate their birthdays at 60.

Regardless of the scale of the celebration, peaches and noodles, which are both signs of long life, are required. But interestingly the peaches are not real. They are actually steamed wheaten food with sweet stuff inside. They are called peaches just because they are made in the shape of peaches. When the noodles are cooked, they should not be cut short, for the shortened noodles can have a bad implication. Everyone at the celebration eats the two foods to extend their best wishes to the long-life star. The typical birthday presents are usually two or four of eggs, long noodles, artificial peaches, tonics, wine and money in red paper.

Newborn Children

Chinese people put their family in a very important position as they regard it as a means to keep the family blood stream continuously running. And the running family blood stream maintains the life of the whole nation. That is why children production and breeding in China becomes a focus of all members of families. It is even accepted by them as an essential moral duty. There is a Chinese saying that of all who lack filial piety, the worst is who has no children.

Many traditional customs about preproduction of children are all based on the idea of children protection. When a wife is found to be pregnant, people will say she "has happiness," and all her family members will feel overjoyed about it. Throughout the whole period of pregnancy, both she and the fetus are well attended, so that the fetus is not hurt in any way and the new generation is born both physically and mentally healthy. To keep the fetus in a good condition, the going-to-be mother is offered sufficient nutritious foods and some traditional Chinese medicines believed to be helpful to the fetus.

When the baby is born, the mother is required to "zuoyuezi" or stay in bed for a month in order to recover from the fatigue. In this month, she is advised to stay at home and not to go outdoors. Cold, wind, dirty air, and tiredness are said to exert bad effect on her health and thus her later life.
A good name for a child is considered equally important. The Chinese think a name may somehow determine the future of the child. Therefore, all possible factors must be taken into account when they are naming their children.

Traditionally, two parts of a name are essential, the family name or last name and a character showing the generation order of the family. Another character in the first name is chosen as the namer pleases. The generation signing characters in the names are usually given by the forefathers, who chose them from a line of a poem or found their own and put them in the genealogy for their descendents to use. For this reason, it is possible to know the relationships between the family relatives by just looking at their names.

Another custom is to find the newborn baby's Eight Characters (in four pairs, indicating the year, month, day and hour of a person's birth, each pair consisting of one Heavenly Stem and one Earthly Branch, formerly used in fortune-telling) and the element in the Eight Characters. It is traditionally believed in China that the world is made up of five principal elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. A person's name is to include an element that he lacks in his Eight Characters. If he lacks water, for example, then his name is supposed to contain a word like river, lake, tide, sea, stream, rain, or any word associating with water. If he lacks metal, then he is to be given a word like gold, silver, iron, or steel.

Some parents prefer to use a character from an eminent person's name, hoping that their child inherits that person's nobility and greatness. Characters with noble and encouraging connotations are also among the first choices. Some parents inject their own wishes into their children's names. When they want to have a boy, they may name their girl Zhaodi meaning expecting a brother.

The first important event for the newly born baby is the one-month celebration. In Buddhist or Taoist families, on the morning of the baby's 30th day, sacrifices are offered to the gods so that the gods will protect the baby in his subsequent life. Ancestors are also virtually informed of the arrival of the new member in the family. According to the customs, relatives and friends receive gifts from the child's parents. Types of gifts vary from place to place, but eggs dyed red are usually a must both in town and the countryside. Red eggs are chosen as gifts probably because they are the symbol of changing process of life and their round shape is the symbol of harmonious and happy life. They are made red because red color is a sign of happiness in Chinese culture. Besides eggs, food like cakes, chickens and hams are often used as gifts. As people do in the Spring Festival, gifts given are always in even number.

Sharing a Common Household Budget

Sharing a budget is a strictly economic way of viewing what families shared, but sharing went beyond that. In the religious sphere, families tended to share luck. A family in which one member was chronically sick while another had bad habits and a third tended to make bad investments might seek to treat all of these as symptoms of a single ill, the lack of harmony of the family as a whole.

Since the family was the unit of ownership, even down to the level of sharing toothbrushes, there was nothing that quite corresponded to inheritance. An important debate emerged as western-inspired law sought to guarantee inheritance for women as well as for men. One effect of individual inheritance was that married daughters were legitimate inheritors from their parents.

Marriage

Traditional Chinese marriage was not the free union of two young adults to establish a new household. It was the movement of a woman from her family of birth or niángjia to her married family and her assimilation into her married family as an economically productive member of the family corporation and the mother of her husband's children.

During marriage there was a strongly held preference and expectation that a newly married couple should live with the groom's family. It was considered ideal for all men in a family to marry and bring their wives to live on the family estate, and for all women born to a family to marry and go out to live with their husbands. The change of families was of course a defining moment in a woman's life, a time of great sorrow at leaving her girlhood home. In some parts of western China there is a tradition of women's musical lamentations on this theme, and the days leading up to marriage may be celebrated with carefully structured sessions of ritualized sobbing involving the bride-to-be and her unmarried friends or younger sisters.

Sometimes the groom went to live with the wife's family, not merely a matter of economic convenience, but often it was because the wife's family had no son, and the son-in-law was accepted in lieu of a son, sometimes changing his surname, which was an act of disgraceful unfiliality towards his own parents, if living, or more often promising that the first son born to the marriage would take the name of the wife's father.

Because this broke the cultural norm, it was considered a last resort, and husbands were viewed with suspicion and scorn. The marriage was disparaged as a "backward-growing sprout" or daozhù miáo, and the man referred to as a "superfluous husband" or zhuìxù, even though he was, obviously, considered necessary.

Non Traditional Families

Not all Chinese were able to live in family groups. Flood, fire, famine, war, banditry, plague, infertility, and flight from the law were all reasons why some individuals might be left alone to wander the world without family ties. People outside of families were usually regarded with a mixture of pity, suspicion, and contempt.

Monasteries

Some outside of the traditional family lived in the world of Buddhist monasticism where individuals might take vows that removed them from their original families and became Buddhist monks and nuns. A fully ordained monk or nun received the mock surname Shì, the first syllable of the full name of the Shakyamuni Buddha, Shìjiamóuní. The cleric took on the "ancestral" reverence to a line of earlier clerics, and was in turn to be reverenced on temple ancestral altars by a line of later ones.

In addition to ordained clerics, monastic establishments also were home to unmarriageable people, wandering children, battered women, and other people who did not take full vows, but had no place else to go, or in some cases simply preferred the ambiance of the monastery. The most important categories were abandoned children assimilated under the general term "small disciples" xiao shamí, and unwed, divorced or abandoned women, who took partial reversible vows and were usually called zhaiga. Zhaiga were not permitted to change monasteries at will and tended to work as servants in the monastic establishments.

Finally monasteries sometimes served as hospices for the disfigured, diseased, and dying, as insane asylums, and in general as shelters for people unable to care for themselves. In all parts of the world care for such people in pre-modern societies was shocking to modern understandings, but Chinese Buddhists did what they could, even if it was not much.

Paper Sons

In America, many Chinese have different Chinese last names than their English-translated last name. For example, someone may have the last name Wong in English, but in reality, they may be from the Chin family. Chinese immigrants that came to the United States as "paper sons" have this false identity. Paper sons are Chinese immigrants that claimed to be sons of American citizens using false papers.

Unfair laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1892 prohibited the legal immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States. Congress thought that there were already too many Chinese in the United States in 1882. About .002 percent of the population (2 out of every 100,000 persons) were Chinese.

The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 in San Francisco destroyed the Federal Building housing all of the official records of the U.S. Government, including immigration records. The fire burned most birth and citizenship records kept by the city. Many Chinese people started to claim that they had been born in the United States, that their birth records had been destroyed, and that they were in fact citizens. American citizenship would allow them to travel freely and bring their families to the United States from China. This plan would get around the strict immigration laws.

The legal Chinese immigrants in the United States claimed that they had sons in China. The Chinese would create fake documents or "papers" for their "sons". They would sell these documents to Chinese who wanted to come to the United States. The documents included information, letters, identification papers, and false testimonies that would prove the relationship between the prospective immigrant and the Chinese American citizen. Everyone would benefit from this plan because the legal Chinese immigrants made money, and the Chinese who wanted to immigrate to the United States now had the chance.

Congress did not want members of the mostly male Chinese population to marry and have families with white women. The state of California even created the Anti-Miscegenation Law of 1906 prohibiting Chinese from marrying non-Chinese. This law was eventually nullified in 1948. As American citizens, the Chinese men who were in the United States before 1882 were allowed to return to China, marry, produce children, and bring their sons back to the United States. The government had restricted Chinese women immigrating to the United States for fear the Chinese would reproduce in large numbers.