We employ a cross-sectional data set of 256 prefectures in China to analyze the impact of lineage organization on private provision of public goods. OLS estimates show that regions with strong lineage organizations coexisted with more privately provided public goods in traditional China. We then suggest that the traditional crop areas resulted in local people's psychological differences in rice-growing and wheat-growing China, and hence the difference in power of lineage organizations. By using the traditional rice areas to instrument for the traditional lineage organizations, our two-stage regressions confirm the causal relationship between lineage organizations and private provision of public goods. This paper helps to teach and learn well about the collective actions.