The important and complex role of agnatic kinship in the history of Chinese local society must have been impressed on Zheng Zhenman since his youth in a village in Putian, where stately ancestral halls and rows of huge courtyard-style family dwellings have survived the turmoil of the Maoist period. In Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian, Zheng outlines a new model of the history of agnatic kinship in Chinese history. He begins by building a typology of household and lineage organizations and a structural model for the relationship between the two. Next, he considers the internal development cycles of households and lineages in different historical contexts, elucidating the impact of geographical and historical factors on the development of the Chinese lineage. He then links the emergence of lineage society to broader trends in Chinese economic, political, and cultural history