Some authors believe that Chinese leading families generally pass
through a three- or four-generation cycle: a family member by his
official position is able to acquire much land, and his family moves
upward. He is able to give the best education and other facilities to
his sons who lead a good life. But either these sons or the grandsons
are spoiled and lazy; they begin to lose their property and status. The
family moves downward, until in the fourth or fifth generation a new
rise begins. Actual study of families seems to indicate that this is not
true. The main branch of the family retains its position over centuries.
But some of the branch families, created often by the less able family
members, show a tendency towards downward social mobility.

It is clear from the above that a gentry family should be interested in
having a fair number of children. The more sons they have, the more
positions of power the family can occupy and thus, the more secure it
will be; the more daughters they have, the more "political" marriages
they can conclude, i.e. marriages with sons of other gentry families in
positions of influence. Therefore, gentry families in China tend to be,
on the average, larger than ordinary families, while in our Western
countries the leading families usually were smaller than the lower class
families. This means that gentry families produced more children than
was necessary to replenish the available leading positions; thus, some
family members had to get into lower positions and had to lose status.
In view of this situation it was very difficult for lower class families
to achieve access into this gentry group. In European countries the
leading _élite_ did not quite replenish their ranks in the next
generation, so that there was always some chance for the lower classes
to move up into leading ranks. The gentry society was, therefore, a
comparably stable society with little upward social mobility but with
some downward mobility. As a whole and for reasons of gentry