Introduction: When Rites Are Lost, Seek Them Among the Folk
Ritual custom constitutes the deepest cultural fabric and everyday order of rural China. From the Duke of Zhou's establishment of rites and music, through the classicization of the Yili and the Liji, to the popularization of Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, ritual custom has always been subject to adaptation and reform. Since the twentieth century, from the New Life Movement of the Republican era to the implementation of the Marriage Law in New China, and further to the protection of intangible cultural heritage in the new century, transforming customs and the heritagization of ritual custom have become two parallel threads. According to National Bureau of Statistics data, by the end of 2023 China's urbanization rate of permanent residents reached 66.16 percent, and the soil sustaining traditional ritual custom has undergone drastic change. This article takes institutions, practices, and space as its dimensions, sorts out the internal logic of the contemporary transformation of ritual custom, and explores possible paths for rural reconstruction.
1. The Unity of Ritual and Custom: A Millennium of Evolution from Classics to Countryside
The term "ritual and custom" first appears in the "Zhouli: Tianguan: Dazai" (Rites of Zhou: Heavenly Offices: Grand Minister): "Govern the capital and its outskirts with eight principles... the sixth is ritual and custom, by which the people are controlled." Here ritual and custom are discussed together, referring to the mutual permeation of state ritual institutions and popular customs. When Zheng Xuan of the Han dynasty annotated the Rites of Zhou, he grounded ritual and custom in matters of mourning, sacrifice, and marriage. Du You's Comprehensive Institutions of the Tang dynasty, in two hundred volumes, devoted half to ritual, showing the importance attached to ritual at the institutional level. The Song dynasty was a critical period for the downward diffusion of ritual and custom. Zhu Xi, using the Family Rituals as his model, simplified the capping, marriage, mourning, and sacrificial rites that had originally belonged to the scholar-official class, making them applicable to commoner households. The editors of the Siku Quanshu commented that the Family Rituals "carefully and precisely distinguishes what is appropriate for ancient and modern times and for the changes in human feeling." During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Family Rituals became a core component of popular daily-use encyclopedias, and together with works such as Zhu Xi's Family Instructions shaped the daily order of a ritual-and-custom society. During the Hongwu reign of Emperor Taizu of the Ming, the "Edict to Instruct the People" was promulgated, stipulating that minor matters such as marriage, land disputes, and brawls among the people be adjudicated by village elders, so that ritual and custom and law became mutually complementary. During the Yongzheng reign of the Qing, the official "Sacred Edict and Amplified Instructions" was promoted, expounded by village covenants on the first and fifteenth of each month, bringing ritual and customary edification to an unprecedented scale.
In the mid-to-late Ming dynasty, with the monetization of silver and the rise of commercial towns, ritual and custom saw transgression and transformation. The Wanli-era Gazetteer of She County records that Huizhou originally "valued simplicity in marriage rites," but after the Jiajing and Longqing reigns, "the wealthy counted betrothal gifts in hundreds of taels," and extravagance gradually flourished. This anxiety over "the collapse of ritual and music" appears repeatedly in the writings of scholar-officials; Gu Yanwu's Record of Daily Knowledge criticized that "the rituals of today are not the rituals of antiquity." But from another perspective, the fluidity of ritual and custom is precisely where its vitality lies. The Qing scholar Qin Huitian compiled the Comprehensive Examination of the Five Rites in two hundred sixty-two volumes, attempting to integrate the five categories of auspicious, celebratory, guest, military, and inauspicious rites; his cited sources extended across the classics, histories, philosophical works, and belles-lettres, reflecting the late imperial effort to integrate ritual institutions. This tug-of-war between high and low constitutes the fundamental dynamic of the history of ritual and custom.
From the perspective of social history, the transmission of ritual and custom relied on intermediate organizations such as clans, village covenants, and charitable halls. In the Song dynasty, the Lü brothers of Lantian promoted the Lü Family Village Covenant, with its guiding principles of "encouraging one another in virtue and achievement, admonishing one another against faults, associating in ritual and custom, and succoring one another in adversity," inaugurating the tradition of voluntary ritual and customary edification among the people. In the late Ming and early Qing, charitable halls such as the Jiangnan Mutual Benevolence Societies and foundling hospitals were widely established, and their operations included a great deal of ritual practice, such as the adoption ceremonies of foundling hospitals and the lecture assemblies of the Mutual Benevolence Societies. During the Daoguang reign of the Qing, the three counties of Changzhou, Yuanhe, and Wuxian in Suzhou Prefecture had more than one hundred charitable halls, undertaking functions such as relieving widows, raising infants, and providing coffins; the ritual procedures of these organizations constituted the daily texture of ritual and custom. Liang Shuming pointed out in The Essence of Chinese Culture that Chinese society is "ethically oriented," and that ritual and custom is precisely the dynamic practice that sustains ethical relations, rather than a rigid dogma.
2. Transforming Social Customs: A Century of Interaction Between State Power and Folk Rituals
In the late Qing and early Republic, the transformation of rituals and customs was tightly interwoven with nation-state building. In 1912, the Nanjing Provisional Government issued the "Order to the Ministry of the Interior to Instruct All Provinces to Persuade and Prohibit Foot-Binding," abolishing old customs by state decree. In 1928, the Ministry of the Interior published the "Draft Wedding Ceremony," stipulating that weddings must no longer use kneeling and bowing, instead adopting the bow, and promoting group weddings. That same year, the Shanghai Social Bureau held the first group wedding, with 57 couples participating and several thousand spectators in attendance. In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement in Nanchang, taking "propriety, righteousness, integrity, and shame" as its guiding principles and promoting discipline and cleanliness, but the actual results were limited, and after the full outbreak of the War of Resistance in 1937 the movement tended toward stagnation. The common feature of these attempts was the top-down imposition of decrees, lacking a grasp of the inner logic of rural society. During the Republican period, the sociologist Li Jinghan, in his survey of Ding County, found that peasants responded coldly to the new-style weddings advocated by the authorities, because rituals and customs involve family face and community recognition, which no piece of legislation can shake.
The truly profound transformation began with the promulgation of the 1950 Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China, whose first article established the abolition of the feudal marriage system of arranged and forced marriage and the superiority of men over women. The ensuing campaign of implementation penetrated deep into the countryside. According to 1953 statistics of the Government Administration Council, about 85 percent of regions nationwide carried out publicity on the Marriage Law. Between 1950 and 1953, courts nationwide accepted more than three million marriage cases, the majority of which were initiated by women, indicating that women's awareness of their rights had begun to awaken. The cooperative movement and the people's commune system further dismantled clan organizations; ancestral halls were converted into warehouses or schools, and ancestor worship activities were banned or simplified. But rituals and customs did not disappear; they survived in new forms, such as collective weddings and memorial meetings replacing traditional funerals, while political rituals permeated daily customs.
After reform and opening up, rituals and customs underwent revival and deformation. In the 1980s, clan activities reemerged in places such as Wenzhou and Quanzhou, and the compiling of genealogies, building of ancestral halls, and ancestor worship gradually resumed. In the 1990s, as the market economy deepened, the tendency to vie for ostentation in weddings and funerals grew ever more intense. According to data from the China Civil Affairs Statistical Yearbook, the national cremation rate was 53.7 percent in 2000 and rose to 58.9 percent by 2020, but in some areas the practice persisted of placing ashes in coffins for reburial. In 2018, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and 16 other departments jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Promoting Funeral Reform and Promoting the Development of the Funeral Industry," proposing that by 2020 the cremation rate be stabilized at a relatively high level. In 2019, the Central Agricultural Office and 11 other departments issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Advancing the Transformation of Social Customs and Building Civilized Rural Traditions," explicitly targeting such unhealthy trends as exorbitant bride prices, lavish funerals with meager care during life, and extravagance and waste. Henan, Shandong, and other places subsequently introduced standards limiting bride prices; for example, Puyang in Henan stipulated that rural bride prices not exceed 60,000 yuan, and Yishui in Shandong carried out a "fully free funerals" reform that by 2021 had saved the public about one billion yuan in costs.
3. Intangible Cultural Heritage Designation: The Repositioning of Ritual Customs as Cultural Heritage
In 2003, UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and China acceded to it in 2004. In 2005, the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Strengthening the Protection of China's Intangible Cultural Heritage, establishing the policy of "protection first, rescue as a priority, rational utilization, and transmission and development." In 2011, the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People's Republic of China came into effect, explicitly listing "traditional rituals, festivals, and other folk customs" within the scope of intangible cultural heritage protection. As of 2023, China had 43 items inscribed on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage lists, among which those directly related to ritual customs include the "Dragon Boat Festival" (2009), "Mazu Belief and Customs" (2009), and the "Twenty-Four Solar Terms" (2016). Intangible cultural heritage designation transformed ritual customs from "survivals" into "cultural resources," with protection emphasizing "living transmission"—that is, heritage should continue in the daily life of communities.
But intangible cultural heritage designation inevitably brings standardization and staging. Take Mazu belief and customs as an example: the Meizhou Mazu Sacrificial Ceremony was inscribed in 2006 on the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list, and its ritual procedures were compiled jointly by scholars and local cultural departments, with sacrificial music and dance and the specifications of ceremonial processions all having fixed texts, already differing from the ancient rites recorded in the Qing dynasty Record of Mazu's Manifestations. Similarly, the "Sacrifice to Emperor Shun," inscribed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2011, is held at Mount Jiuyi in Ningyuan, Hunan; its public sacrifice ceremony was restored in 2004 and employs imitation-antique yi dance, yet participating ordinary people have limited understanding of its ancient meaning. Anthropologist Peng Zhaorong points out that the "authenticity" of intangible cultural heritage is often a construction, and its value lies in providing localities with symbolic resources for cultural identity. The Shaoxing Sacrifice to Yu the Great restored public sacrifice in 2007, held each year at the Grain Rain solar term, blending ancient di sacrifice with contemporary public sacrifice procedures; participants number in the thousands, and it has become a core project of local cultural tourism.
Another side of intangible cultural heritage designation is community participation and the inheritor system. As of 2023, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism had recognized 3,056 national-level representative inheritors of intangible cultural heritage, of whom about 400 are related to folk customs and rituals. Take the "lunar twenty-four solar terms" as an example: related customs such as the "Jiuhua Beginning of Spring Sacrifice" in Quzhou, Zhejiang, and the "Zhuang Frost's Descent Festival" in Tiandeng, Guangxi, are both inscribed as national intangible cultural heritage, but the inheritors are mostly elderly people, facing a break in transmission. In addition, intangible cultural heritage protection has also given rise to a "folk custom economy." The Miao Gulzang Festival in Qiandongnan, Guizhou, is held once every thirteen years and was inscribed in 2006 on the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage; its rituals include slaughtering cattle to sacrifice to ancestors and lusheng stomping-dance in the hall. In recent years, the locality has combined the Gulzang Festival with tourism. During the Gulzang Festival in 2022 at Langde Miao Village in Leishan County, about 120,000 tourist visits were received, generating tourism revenue of about 20 million yuan, but commercialization has also sparked controversy over the sacredness of the ritual.
4. Rural Reconstruction: The Rebuilding of Ritual Space and Community Memory
The survival of rituals and customs depends on physical space. Ancestral halls, temples, opera stages, and groves at water outlets in traditional villages form the spatial system for ritual practice. According to data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, as of 2023, a total of 8,155 villages in six batches have been included in the List of Traditional Chinese Villages, and a large number of them have preserved ritual spaces. The "Yuezhou Zhang Clan Ancestral Hall" in Songkou Ancient Town, Yongtai, Fujian, and the "Ye Clan Ancestral Hall" in Songyang, Zhejiang, among others, have been restored and put back into use for ancestor worship, weddings, and village history exhibitions. In 2014, the National Cultural Heritage Administration launched a pilot program for the "adoption" of heritage buildings, encouraging social forces to participate in the protection and use of ancestral halls and temples. The Nanhu Academy in Hongcun, Anhui, and the Yu Clan Ancestral Hall in Wangkou, Wuyuan, Jiangxi, have all obtained maintenance funds through the integration of culture and tourism, but in some cases excessive commercialization has turned ritual spaces into purely consumer venues.
The core of rural reconstruction lies in restoring the subjectivity of the community. In the 1930s, Liang Shuming carried out rural construction experiments in Zouping, Shandong, establishing rural peasant schools and village schools in an attempt to rebuild rural organization through ritual education, but the effort was interrupted by the War of Resistance. Yan Yangchu promoted mass education in Ding County, Hebei, and his "four great educations" (literary and artistic, livelihood, health, and civic) included ritual reform. In the early 21st century, scholars such as Wen Tiejun promoted "new rural reconstruction," establishing elderly associations and cultural performance teams in places such as Lankao in Henan and Fang County in Hubei to revive collective festival activities. The elderly association of Huzhai Village in Lankao, Henan, founded in 2004, has organized Double Ninth Festival ceremonies honoring the elderly and Spring Festival group greetings, with membership growing from just over 30 at the beginning to more than 200. Such practices show that the contemporary transformation of rituals requires endogenous organizational vehicles.
The upgraded version of Zhejiang's "Fengqiao Experience" includes a system of "village worthy advisory councils." As of 2022, there were about 15,000 registered village worthy advisory councils across Zhejiang, with village worthies participating in red and white affairs councils and moral appraisal councils to promote the standardization of wedding and funeral customs. The "Six-Foot Lane" mediation method in Tongcheng, Anhui, transforms the tradition of yielding into a mechanism for mediating community disputes and was selected in 2021 as a national case of social governance innovation. These explorations show that the social capital contained in rituals, such as reciprocity, trust, and face, can be converted into governance resources through institutional design. But two tendencies must be guarded against: first, wholesale restoration of the old, which turns ritual authority into hierarchy; second, excessive instrumentalization, using rituals only from the perspective of economic or governance performance.
5. Ritual Practices and Generational Tensions amid Urban-Rural Transformation
Urbanization has profoundly changed the forms in which rituals and customs are practiced. According to National Bureau of Statistics data, in 2023 China's population separated from their registered household location reached 505 million, of whom 376 million were migrant workers. The departure of large numbers of young and middle-aged people from their hometowns has made it difficult for the relatives of the "five degrees of mourning" in traditional funerals to gather, simplifying segments such as ritual wailing and keeping vigil. At the same time, new services such as "proxy tomb-sweeping" and "mourning on behalf of clients" have appeared in urban communities. During the 2023 Qingming Festival, orders for "proxy tomb-sweeping" services on some e-commerce platforms rose by about 30 percent year on year, with services including wiping tombstones, laying flowers, and reading memorial texts aloud. This "outsourcing of rituals" has sparked controversy: one side holds that it sustains the emotional expression of remembering the departed with solemn care, while the other criticizes it for severing the bodily and mental connection between the ritual and those who experience it firsthand.
Generational differences are equally striking. A 2019 survey by Horizon Research Consultancy Group showed that among those aged 18 to 30, about 65 percent believed that the "bowing to heaven and earth" ritual in traditional weddings could be simplified or abolished, while among those over 60, only about 20 percent held this view. In Wenzhou, Zhejiang, the "new Chinese-style wedding" that has become popular in recent years blends Hanfu and Zhou-dynasty wedding elements, but its participants are mostly urban white-collar workers, and it coexists without conflict with the local traditional "three-day wedding" custom. Anthropologist Yan Yunxiang, in Private Life under Socialism, records changes in bride price in Xiajia village, Heilongjiang: from "a few dozen yuan" in the 1950s to "tens of thousands of yuan" in the 1990s, and then to "three jin and three liang" (one hundred yuan notes weighing about 140,000 yuan) after 2000. Bride price has evolved from compensation for the loss of the woman's family's labor power into a dual expression of intergenerational property transfer and face.
Environmental constraints are also reshaping rituals. In 2017, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and five other departments issued the Notice on Further Improving the Ban on Straw Burning and Comprehensive Utilization, imposing restrictions on the burning of paper offerings and fireworks. Cities such as Beijing and Shanghai promoted activities during the Qingming period such as "exchanging fresh flowers for paper money" and "sending grief via ribbons." After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Ministry of Civil Affairs advocated "cloud tomb-sweeping," and that year online tomb-sweeping platforms nationwide served more than 10 million visits. Some of these emergency measures have settled into regular practice, such as the "digital cemetery" launched by Shanghai Fusouyuan in 2020, which has established online memorial halls for nearly ten thousand families. The carriers of ritual have extended from physical space to digital space, yet their social function—binding relatives together and expressing grief—has not disappeared, but simply changed media.
6. Theoretical Reflections: The Internal Tensions and Boundaries of Ritual Custom Transformation
The contemporary transformation of ritual customs has always faced a triple tension. The first is the tension between state will and folk autonomy. From the forced unbinding of feet and cutting of queues during the Republican period to contemporary funeral reform, the state has often promoted standardization in the name of "civilization," but the populace has frequently responded with "flexible adaptation." For example, under cremation policies, some areas have seen "secondary coffining," in which the body is first cremated and the ashes are then placed in a coffin for burial, which both meets cremation-rate assessments and satisfies the psychological need for peaceful interment in the earth. The sociologist Ying Xing records in A History of Moral and Political Judgment in Villages that although the political movements from the 1950s to the 1970s struck at clan rituals, the practical logic of "cultivating connections and emphasizing human obligations" continued quietly. The second is the tension between cultural authenticity and tourism commercialization. Once intangible cultural heritage items enter the tourism market, their ritual timing and rules of participation may become subordinated to tourists' schedules and consumer demand, causing "cultural performance" to become detached from "lived practice." The third is the tension between intergenerational transmission and individualization. The younger generation, having absorbed individualist values in cities, shows reduced willingness to participate obligatorily in traditional ritual customs, yet still has a demand for "meaningful rituals."
Faced with these tensions, scholars have proposed different paths. The folklorist Liu Kuili emphasizes that "folk matters should be handled by the folk," advocating that intangible cultural heritage protection should respect community self-management. The sociologist Li Peilin argues in The End of the Village that rural reconstruction is not the restoration of old institutions but "rebuilding community in the midst of mobility." The anthropologist Wang Mingming advocates understanding ritual customs from the perspective of the "intermediate circle," namely that state and folk society form a flexible structure through the exchange of ritual. From the practical level, "ancestral hall revival" activities in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong increased greatly after 2010. According to statistics, more than 300 ancestral halls were repaired in Shantou between 2015 and 2020, with funds mostly donated by entrepreneurs, yet the rituals included both the traditional three-offering ceremony and modern elements such as honoring outstanding students and reading village covenants aloud. This shows that the transformation of ritual customs is not a linear replacement but an accumulation of layers.
7. Future Pathways: Settling Rituals and Customs in a Mobile Society
The prospects for the transformation of contemporary rituals and customs depend on whether new "fields of ritual and custom" can be established in a mobile society. First, urban and rural communities need to reserve public space for the practice of rituals and customs. The "Standards for the Construction of Complete Residential Communities (Trial)" issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in 2021 proposed that communities should be equipped with facilities such as cultural activity stations, which can also serve as venues for ritual and custom activities. Second, digital technology can become an auxiliary tool for transmitting rituals and customs. For example, since the "China Heroes and Martyrs Network" went online in 2014, its cumulative visits have exceeded ten billion, making it a national platform for online tomb-sweeping during Qingming Festival. However, digital rituals and customs should be positioned as a supplement rather than a replacement, and their design needs to preserve a sense of ceremony, such as virtual flower offerings, candle lighting, and message leaving. Third, the education system can appropriately incorporate content on ritual and custom culture. The "Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan" issued by the Ministry of Education in 2022 requires strengthening education on fine traditional Chinese culture, and some schools have already incorporated traditional festival etiquette and family precept recitation into school-based curricula.
From a broader perspective, the contemporary transformation of rituals and customs is a microcosm of the self-renewal of Chinese civilization. It must respond to the challenges of individualization, urbanization, and commercialization brought by modernity, while also drawing from tradition social capital such as "reciprocity," "trust," and "reverence." Future rituals and customs will no longer be a uniform "old ritual," but a pluralistic coexistence of "new customs." When the "Pudu" in Quanzhou, Fujian, shifts from extravagant banquets to charitable donations, and when the "Zhufu" in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, expands from sacrificial ceremonies to community neighborhood festivals, rituals and customs complete a creative transformation in silence. Such transformation cannot be imposed from the top down; it can only emerge slowly in community life. Only by respecting grassroots vitality can rituals and customs continue to play their deep function of "settling people's hearts and maintaining order" in the reconstruction of rural society.
Conclusion
The contemporary transformation of ritual customs is essentially the continuation and reconstruction of traditional and modern China at the level of everyday life. From the parallel emphasis on rites and customs in the Rites of Zhou, to the popularization of the Family Rituals, and further to contemporary intangible cultural heritage protection and the reform of outdated customs, ritual customs have always sought a balance between "change" and "constancy." The reform of outdated customs provides institutional impetus, intangible cultural heritage designation confers cultural legitimacy, and rural reconstruction attempts to repair community carriers. The three are not substitutes for one another but are mutually complementary. Yet it must be clearly recognized that the vitality of ritual customs lies in their daily use among the people, not in administrative directives or tourism performances.
Looking ahead, ritual customs will continue to evolve amid structural changes such as urban-rural integration, the digital society, and population aging. Policymakers need to shift from "managing ritual customs" to "serving ritual customs," leaving space for community self-governance. Scholars need to strengthen field research, documenting ritual practices that are disappearing and those that are emerging. And ordinary people, in every wedding and funeral, every festival celebration, participate through their own embodied practice in the contemporary writing of this ancient civilization. When rites are lost, one seeks them among the people—perhaps it is precisely in the fluid countryside that ritual customs can find their future dwelling place.