Legal historians concerned with traditional Chinese society have been interested in the "lineage" or "descent group" for a number of reasons. To name but two, one is the understanding of how property rights were organised through descent, and the other is to work out how social organisation through these groups was related to the rule of the imperial state bureaucracy. The seminal works of Maurice Freedman that came out in the late 1950s formulated an influential picture that integrated answers to both lines of inquiry. Based on the idea of the "lineage village", where agnatic and territorial groupings coincided, Freedman's formulation singled out the lineage, brought together and asymmetrically segmented through the distribution of property rights, as a dominant social organisation in southeastern China. However, his arguments have been criticised both in terms of their descriptive accuracy and by way of theoretical challenges against his structural-functionalist assumptions. This paper looks into how new lines of inquiry concerning lineages / descent groups were opened in conjunction with these criticisms, and reviews the current state of scholarship. Moreover, this paper combines this with the fruits of research into the Chinese lineage that come from Japanese and Chinese scholarship, both of which have been inspired by Freedman on one hand but have gone through unique processes of development on the other. Through such an exercise, this paper tries to show new directions of inquiry into the significance of the Chinese lineage, that engage with some fundamental issues of incorporation, local social organisation and property rights.
