Ancestors continue to watch over and can bless or punish their living descendants

Chinese folk religion has traditionally described the person as possessing two distinct kinds of soul, the hun, a lighter, heaven-oriented spirit that ascends after death, and the po, a heavier, earth-oriented soul that remains associated with the body and the grave, and both must be properly settled for a death to be considered complete and safe for the living. The ancestor tablet kept on a household altar is understood to house or provide a point of contact for the hun, allowing descendants to make offerings of food, incense and burnt paper money that the deceased is believed to receive and use in the afterlife, sustaining a continuing relationship of exchange rather than a one-time farewell.

Neglecting these obligations, whether through a family line dying out, forgetting an ancestor's proper rites, or performing a careless or incorrect burial, is believed to leave the dead soul dissatisfied, potentially transforming a properly cared-for ancestor into a dangerous, hungry, wandering ghost with no living family to feed it, the same category of restless dead placated during the Ghost Festival each seventh lunar month. The belief therefore ties correct ritual practice directly to family fortune: a family that keeps its ancestral obligations current can expect protection and blessing, while one that lets them lapse invites misfortune traceable to the neglected dead.

This belief shapes an enormous range of ordinary practice rather than remaining an abstract cosmological claim. Grave siting is taken seriously enough to support an entire specialist discipline, fengshui geomancy, on the premise that a well-placed ancestral grave channels favorable cosmic influence toward the family's living members, while a poorly placed one can bring generations of misfortune, giving material, practical stakes to what might otherwise look like a purely symbolic concern.

Annual observances such as Qingming, the Tomb Sweeping festival in spring, when families clean ancestral graves and renew offerings, and the seventh month Ghost Festival, when the wider category of unattended or forgotten dead receive placating offerings from the community at large rather than from any specific family, both operationalize the belief on a fixed communal calendar rather than leaving it to individual household discretion.

Anthropologists studying Chinese and Taiwanese communities have documented how a family experiencing a run of illness, business failure or other misfortune will often consult a temple medium or diviner specifically to ask whether a neglected or wronged ancestor is responsible, treating the ancestral relationship as a live, ongoing negotiation rather than a settled doctrine, closer in practice to an active social relationship with the dead than to a fixed article of faith.

Sources Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese VillageDavid K. Jordan with The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui: Chinese GeomancyStephen Skinner