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:
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)