Cities
Similar to Europe, Chinese cities were founded as forts or leader's residences and were the centers of trade and crafts. However, they never received political autonomy and in fact sometimes had fewer rights than villages. Likewise, its citizens had no special political rights or privileges; the resident of Chinese cities never constituted a separate status class like the residents of European cities.
The lack of city development is partially due to strengths of kinship ties, which stems from religious beliefs (in ancestral spirits) and maintaining strong ties to the villages in which one's ancestors lived. The guilds likewise competed against each other for the favour of the Emperor, never uniting in order to fight for more rights.
Read more about this topic: The Religion Of China: Confucianism And Taoism
Famous quotes containing the word cities:
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)