China

Modern society is forcing change onto filial piety in China


In China, a set of traditional family values dating back centuries can seem increasingly outdated, but rather than rejecting them wholesale, researchers have found that many Chinese are adapting them to modern life.

These traditional values are a specific set of Confucian moral tenets called “filial piety ”. Broadly speaking the term refers to an expectation that younger generations must respect their parents and ancestors.

As China has rapidly modernised and its population increasingly urbanised over the past 40 years, certain core values of filial piety have become increasingly incongruous with how many Chinese families live their lives, say researchers.

“What I hear from university students thinking about filial piety is they emphasise caring about their parents, and being respectful, but also having respect going both ways,” said Emma Buchtel, an associate professor in the department of psychology at The Education University of Hong Kong, who has studied filial piety in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

“The obedience stuff is called ‘foolish filial piety’, where you just do what your parents say. And they rate that as lower in importance,” she said.

Xu Jing, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, said the English phrase itself, “filial piety”, is imperfect.

In Chinese, filial piety is called xiào shùn , which is more about the virtue of respect and deference than the sentiment of religious devotion implied by the word ‘piety’ in Western contexts.

“Many researchers do not like the term filial piety … it’s a problem with translation. There is not a perfect word to capture what the characters mean,” she said.

But despite the desire for changes, filial piety remains highly valued among young people in China.

As part of a paper under review to be published in 2021, a study from Buchtel and her colleagues asked 195 university students in Hong Kong and 208 in China how they define a person “with high moral character”.

For students in Hong Kong, the term “filial piety” ranked 10th out of 114 possible answers and, for the Beijing students, it ranked sixth out of 110.

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A survey published by China Youth Daily , a nationalistic newspaper, found that, after surveying 1,856 people, 91.5 per cent of respondents found filial piety to be important.

But 60.9 per cent also said, “new ideas should be added”, according to Xinhua, a state-owned newswire that reported the survey in May.

In another paper published in 2019, researchers found that pressures of Chinese society – such as buying houses, paying for childcare or the migrant nature of many Chinese workers which keeps them away from their families for large parts of the year – contribute to “increasing the difficulty of filial practices”.

One of the authors of the 2019 paper, Professor Wang Fengyan from the School of Psychology at Nanjing Normal University, told the South China Morning Post :

“With the rapid development of industrial society and information society, the concept of absolute obedience advocated in the traditional filial piety is no longer applicable to the current society.

“In the face of such a situation, it is very important to advocate positive filial piety and abandon unreasonable and false filial piety.”

Older but wealthier

One traditional feature of filial piety is an expectation that younger generations are supposed to care for their elders, often financially.

But despite being a rapidly ageing country, China is also far wealthier than it was half a century ago, meaning older people often have the resources to take care of themselves and no longer expect their children to become their primary carers as they age.

“Many elderly people in urban China have a pension and their own support network. They do not expect their children to support them materially. Their life is different from their parents’ generation, and from the traditional peasantry in China when there was no other way for elderly care but to fall to the children,” she said.

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She added that, today, many elderly people are more likely to see value in their children making an effort to spend quality time with them.

Wang agreed with this observation and said elderly people are often lonely in the modern age and “long for the company of their families”.

In 2019, the Chinese central government issued a directive to improve “disappearing filial piety” in rural areas, in particular to urge younger people to take care of elderly generations living in villages.

For younger generations, Wang said they still place immense value on filial piety, but recent studies have shown, “more and more young people no longer expect their children to take care of them in life, but expect their children to give them emotional care”.

“This may be related to the fact that young people are economically independent and are more likely to accept nursing homes,” she said.

Possibly the largest source of tension when discussing filial piety is intergenerational disagreement about marriage and children. That, the experts said, is far more complicated.

The high price of starting a family

Chinese mothers gave birth to just 12 million children in 2020, the lowest number since 1961 when the country was in the grips of the Great Famine.

This demographic reality is in direct conflict with one of the most important duties in traditional filial piety: having children.

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Xu said that, at its core, people still hope their children will get married and have grandchildren. She said Chinese grandparents “absolutely adore the young generation” and sacrifice a lot of resources, time and labour to take care of them.

“And they are happy to do that, they think it is meaningful.”

But young people may not have found the right person to marry, or they never intend to get married, which creates diverging expectations.

“There are a lot of complications and tensions,” said Xu.

She said this conflict creates internal dilemmas among many young people. They want to make their family happy but must grapple with the fact that they may not be ready to have kids – be it financially, emotionally or due to pressures at work.

“I think, in general, it is a moral struggle for many young people. Because of their close bonds with and sense of gratitude toward their parents, they really want to make them happy. That conflict can be very deep, it might not manifest daily, but it can be very deep.”

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.



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