It can be shown that over the next centuries, the power of the family head increased.  He was now regarded as owner of the property, not only mere administrator of family property.  He got power over life and death of his children.  This increase of power went together with a change of the position of the ruler.  The period transition (until c.  A.D. 1000) was followed by a period of “moderate absolutism” (until 1278) in which emperors as persons played a greater role than before, and some emperors, such as Shen Tsung (in 1071), even declared that they regarded the welfare of the masses as more important than the profit of the gentry.  After 1278, however, the personal influence of the emperors grew further towards absolutism and in times became pure despotism.

Individuals, especially family heads, gained more freedom in “Modern Times”.  Not only the period of transition, but also the following period was a time of much greater social mobility than existed in the Middle Ages.  By various legal and/or illegal means people could move up into positions of power and wealth:  we know of many merchants who succeeded in being allowed to enter the state examinations and thus got access to jobs in the administration.  Large, influential gentry families in the capital protected sons from less important families and thus gave them a chance to move into the gentry.  Thus, these families built up a clientele of lesser gentry families which assisted them and upon the loyalty of which they could count.  The gentry can from now on be divided into two parts.  First, there was a “big gentry” which consisted of much fewer families than in earlier times and which directed the policy in the capital; and secondly, there was a “small gentry” which was operating mainly in the provincial cities, directing local affairs and bound by ties of loyalty to big gentry families.  Gentry cliques now extended into the provinces and it often became possible to identify a clique with a geographical area, which, however, usually did not indicate particularistic tendencies.

Individual freedom did not show itself only in greater social mobility.  The restrictions which, for instance, had made the craftsmen and artisans almost into serfs, were gradually lifted.  From the early sixteenth century on, craftsmen were free and no more subject to forced labour services for the state.  Most craftsmen in this epoch still had their shops in one lane or street and lived above their shops, as they had done in the earlier period.  But from now on, they began to organize in guilds of an essentially religious character, as similar guilds in other parts of Asia at the same time also did.  They provided welfare services for their members, made some attempts towards standardization of products and prices, imposed taxes upon their members, kept their streets clean and tried to regulate salaries.  Apprentices were initiated in a kind of semi-religious ceremony, and often meetings took place in temples.  No guild, however, connected people of the same craft living in different cities.  Thus, they did not achieve political power.  Furthermore, each trade had its own guild; in Peking in the nineteenth century there existed over 420 different guilds.  Thus, guilds failed to achieve political influence even within individual cities.