The Power Practice Of The Wuxi's Distinguished Families In The 20～(th) Century

The evolvement of distinguished families is all along a hot topic in the academe, but the former researches tend to concentrate on aristocratic families rather than other contents in other periods, especially the historical destiny of the urban distinguished families since the Ming and Qing Dynasty.The thesis just focuses on such distinguished families in Wuxi as an object in the frame of the theory of capital, with the context of the social change of modernization and the methods of typical survey and case analysis together with the study of historical data of Wuxi. It starts with four aspects of urban distinguished families including their structures, functions, social characteristics and power in daily life, with combination of static description and dynamic analysis, so as to discover the cause, style, mechanism and rule of their evolvement in the background of rapid social changes, to display the scenes of their life, to reveal the interactive relation between their evolvement and social changes, finally to evaluate their historical status as scientifically as possible.It is the logical starting point of this thesis to study the distinguished families through the analysis of power, which is not only limited to the legal power approved by systemized organizations of bureaucracy, but also a kind of relation among different forces formed in the possession and allocation of opportunities and resources. The relation exists in a series of events and rises from the interactive process of these events. Therefore the course of development of the distinguished families is as a matter of fact the course of their power exercise, as well as the course of capitalization of the resources for power.In order to study their strategies and techniques for role-transforming and position-raising, this thesis puts emphasis on the depictions of some events in the families: 1) Through reviewing Family Qian's living practice, to demonstrate the strategies for living, education and wedding etc. in the distinguished families. 2) Through reviewing the changes of Family Qing's residences, to demonstrate the circulation of cultural capitals. 3) Through reviewing the development of Family Tang's great fortune, to demonstrate the circulation of economic capitals. 4) Through sticking to the clue of ancestral hall and genealogy, to demonstrate the circulation of symbolic capitals.The most obvious feature of the distinguished families is culture and humanism. Paying full attention to the accumulation and succession of culture contributes to maintaining the sense of self-identity of family members. Furthermore, devotion to fostering talents produces their superiority in elite class which make their self extension full of motility.Distinguished family, as the outcome of certain historical period, inevitably follows the track from flourish to decline. However, as actors, they have strong capabilities in adapting themselves to the transform from agricultural society to industrial society. The old traditional distinguished families were forced to reform in order to meet the change when imperial examination system abolished after Xinhai...