Abstract: This essay investigates the key elements of three broad categories of institutions that constituted China’s basic level society during the later half of the Qing dynasty: village, baojia, city and suburbs; family, lineage, and clan; guilds, and village/clan economic organizations. The different social standings and methods of intercommunication among these institutions reflected the state of development and the special characteristics of China’s social and economic institutions at that time. The author maintains these three broad categories of social institutions had different social standings and accurately represented the horizontal structure of Chinese society in the later half of the Qing. Moreover the method of intercommunication, accurately represented the vertical structure of Chinese society in the later half of the Qing. These special characteristics demonstrate that traditional social and economic institutions had already begun to show some degree of flexibility in the later half of the Qing, but this type of flexibility was far from a final break with tradition, and there was still a long process of change ahead.