The Western individual who owes money and cannot or will not pay can always shoot himself or abscond or go bankrupt. He may leave a stigma on his family if it is known who his family are, but the debts were his own and his relations cannot be held responsible. But the identification of the interests and obligations of an individual with those of his family have in agricultural China this peculiar and socially beneficial result, that a man cannot dissolve his liabilities by such a simple process as going bankrupt or dying.[82] His rights are inherited by his sons: so are his liabilities. The law, it is true, limits a man's liability for an ancestor's debts to the extent of his own inheritance: but the rule of custom is sterner than the rule of law. In 1907 a man whom we will call Ku brought me a petition in which he stated that in the seventh year of Chia Ch'ing (one hundred and five years earlier) an ancestor of his had contracted a debt of three tiao (a sum which at the present day is worth five or six shillings) to a man Liu. Liu's descendant, rummaging among the family archives, had recently chanced to come across documentary evidence of this debt (the grimy little scrap of paper was produced in court) and he forthwith brought it to Ku, who had never heard of the transaction, with the suggestion that final settlement of this long-standing little bill was now eminently desirable. Principal and interest together then amounted to something like twenty times the original amount.
The reason why Ku brought his case to my court was not that he objected to this unexpected call upon his slender purse, for as it happened he had already paid the whole amount without a murmur; he merely came to suggest that as the original debtor had two direct living descendants besides himself, those two persons should be required to pay their fair shares of the ancestral debt. He wished to know the views of the court on the point before he demanded payment from them. The man might in law have repudiated this debt altogether: Chinese law does not and could not go as far as local custom in settling questions that directly or indirectly concern the honour of a family. Repudiation of an ancestor's debt is, however, as rare in a Weihaiwei village as is bankruptcy. Debts may go unpaid, but only at the risk of a "loss of face" that would in most cases cause the debtor much greater inconvenience and discomfort than the monetary loss.
Weihaiwei has as yet shown but little tendency to modify its semi-patriarchal social system as a consequence of its fifteen years of continuous contact with Western civilisation. The individual is still sunk in the family. He cannot divest himself of the rights any more than of the responsibilities that belong to him through his family membership. The Weihaiwei farmer has indeed so limited a conception of his own existence as a separate and distinct personality that in ordinary speech he continually confuses himself with his ancestors or with living members of his family. Examples of this are of repeated occurrence in the law-courts. "I bought this land and now the Tung family is trying to steal it from me," complains a petitioner. "When did you buy it?" asks the magistrate. "Two hundred years ago," promptly replies the oppressed one. Says another, "My rights to the property of Sung Lien-têng are being contested by my distant cousin. I am the rightful owner. I buried Sung Lien-têng and have charge of his soul-tablet and carry out the ancestral ceremonies." "When did Sung Lien-têng die?" questions the magistrate. "In the fortieth year of K'ang Hsi" is the reply. This means that the deceased whose property is in dispute died childless in 1701, that plaintiff's ancestor in that year defrayed the funeral expenses and acted as chief mourner, that by family agreement he was installed as adopted son to the deceased and heir to his property, and that plaintiff claims to be the adopted son's descendant and heir. Looking upon his family, dead and alive, as one and indivisible, he could not see any practical difference between the statement that certain funeral rites had been carried out by himself and the statement that they had been carried out by a direct ancestor.
Another litigant, whose long residence abroad had had no apparent effect on his general outlook on life, came to me very recently with the complaint that on his return from Manchuria he had found his land in the possession of a neighbour. "I went to Manchuria as my family had not enough to eat," he said. "I came home this year and wished to redeem the land I had mortgaged before I went away. But I found it had been already redeemed by my neighbour, a cousin, and he refuses to let me redeem it from him." On being asked when he had mortgaged his land and emigrated, he replied: "In Chia Ch'ing 3"—that is, in 1798. He was merely identifying himself with his own great-grandfather.
In another case a man whom I will call A brought a plaint to the effect that he wished to adopt B, and that C for various reasons refused to allow this adoption to take place. On investigation it turns out that B is dead and that it is his infant son D whom A really wishes to adopt. B and D—father and son—seem to A merely different expressions, as it were, of the same entity. This does not mean, of course, that supposing B were still alive it would not matter whether B or D actually became A's adopted son. The rules of adoption in China are strictly regulated. A man cannot adopt any one he likes. Not to mention other necessary conditions, the person adopted must belong to the appropriate generation, that is, to the generation immediately junior to that of the adopter. In the case before us the infant D belonged to the proper generation, and his father B could not have been adopted. To our notions it seems all the stranger that A, knowing this, should have spoken of B when he meant D: yet this manner of speech is exceedingly common.
But after all, if we wish to assure ourselves that the individual is not regarded as an independent unit we must rely on stronger evidence than strange verbal inaccuracies. Perhaps the best and most convincing proofs will be found in the restrictions placed on the powers of the individual to dispose of real property.
It is necessary at the outset to lay stress on the fact that there is no evidence, so far as I am aware, of the former existence, in Weihaiwei or elsewhere in China, of agrarian communism. A village community may indeed possess a common tract of pasture-land, or common pasture or "fuel" rights over private hill-lands at certain seasons of the year,[83] or some arable fields may under certain conditions be cultivated by different persons or different families in turn: but if we were to assume from this that all arable land was once owned in common and that individual or family proprietorship has only gradually superseded an old communistic system, we should be entirely wrong. Students of the laws and customs relating to land must be careful, as Fustel de Coulanges has clearly warned them, "not to confuse agrarian communism with family ownership, which may in time become village ownership without ceasing to be a real proprietorship."[84]