MCLC: morality tales to spur filiality

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: morality tales to spur filiality
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Source: NYT (9/15/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/world/asia/beijing-updates-parables-the-2
4-paragons-of-filial-piety.html

As China Ages, Beijing Turns to Morality Tales to Spur Filial Devotion
By ANDREW JACOBS and ADAM CENTURY

BEIJING — Reading it now, six centuries after Guo Jujing wrote this paean
to parental devotion, “The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety” comes off as a
collection of scary bedtime stories. There is the woman who cut out her
own liver to feed her sick mother, the boy who sat awake shirtless all
night to draw mosquitoes away from his slumbering parents and the man who
sold himself into servitude to pay for a father’s funeral.

While the parables are even more familiar to most Chinese than Grimms’
Fairy Tales are to Americans — the text remains a mainstay of educational
curriculum here — they have understandably lost much of their motivational
punch.

But when the government, in an effort to address the book’s glaring
obsolescence, issued an updated version last month in the hope that the
book would encourage more Chinese to turn away from their increasingly
self-centered ways and perhaps phone home once in a while, it wasn’t quite
prepared for the backlash.

Compared with its predecessor, the new book brims with down-to-earth
suggestions for keeping parents happy in their golden years. Readers are
urged to teach them how to surf the Internet, take Mom to a classic film
and buy health insurance for retired parents.

“Family is the nucleus of society,” intoned Cui Shuhui, the director of
the All-China Women’s Federation, which, along with the China National
Committee on Aging, published the new guidelines after two years of
interviews with older Chinese. “We need family in order to advance Chinese
society and improve our economic situation.”

So far, those good intentions appear to have prompted mostly ridicule. But
they have also unintentionally kicked up a debate on whether the
government, not overextended children, should be looking after China’s
ballooning population of retirees.

In a fast-aging nation where hundreds of millions of people have left
their former homes in the countryside in search of jobs, “The New 24
Paragons of Filial Piety” strikes many as nearly as out of touch with the
problems of modern China as the old parables.

Take, for example, the responsibility to “take one’s parents traveling
frequently.” While feasible for successful professionals, the obligation
is all but impossible for working people, especially the nation’s roughly
252 million migrant workers, few of whom have ever experienced the joys of
leisure travel.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, their numbers are rising
4.4 percent annually, meaning that nearly 11 million rural migrants
arrived in Chinese cities last year alone — and most likely left their
aging parents behind.

Zhang Yang, a fruit vendor in Beijing, scoffed at the suggestion that he
should take his parents on vacation, noting that he rarely stops working
or has time to visit them in their hometown in Henan Province, roughly 400
miles south of the capital.

“One time I didn’t get to go home for four years,” he said sheepishly.
“Business here is good, but I feel guilty for not being with my parents.”

Li Ji, a popular columnist at the state-run Legal Daily newspaper, lashed
out at the new guidelines, arguing that they would not be necessary if the
government provided better care for its citizens. “If the national health
insurance was up to par, children wouldn’t have to worry so much about
their parents’ health, and if companies were required to provide a certain
number of vacation days, children would be able to go home more often,” he
wrote.

Despite the demands of an increasingly fast-paced society, the Confucian
idea of filial devotion is deeply embedded in Chinese society. Tradition
dictates that children live with their parents and care for them in their
old age, a convention that historically provided a safety net.

But the custom is rapidly fraying as children struggle with the logistical
and financial burdens of caring for their aged parents.

This has proved particularly challenging in recent years to the huge
numbers of only children born after the introduction of strict
family-planning rules in the late 1970s. One result, demographers say, is
a skyrocketing number of so-called empty nests filled by older people who
live alone while their children build their own roosts in distant cities.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, empty nests now account for
more than 50 percent of all Chinese households; in some urban areas the
figure has reached 70 percent. A 2011 report by the official Xinhua news
agency said that nearly half of the 185 million people age 60 and older
live apart from their children — a phenomenon unheard of a generation ago.

Like many young Chinese, Chen Xuena, who works for a public relations
company in Beijing, said she was torn between chasing a career and tending
to her parents in far-off Zhejiang Province.

“Every time I visit home I see signs that my parents are getting older,
and it really brings me down,” said Ms. Chen, sitting at one of the
capital’s coffee bars. “But once you get used to the opportunities and
culture of Beijing, it’s hard to leave.”

Such angst will only continue to grow, and not just because China still
lacks a meaningful social safety net for the elderly. Demographers
estimate that the population of those over 60 will triple before 2050;
around the same time, projections show the median age of Chinese will be
higher than that of Americans, but with perhaps one-third of the average
income, adjusted for the cost of living.

Such figures help explain the sense of urgency that is beginning to grip
the governing Communist Party. Last year, in an attempt to ease the impact
from so much atomized living, the National People’s Congress, China’s
legislature, proposed a law that obliges sons and daughters to “return
home to visit their parents frequently.”

The legislation would enable neglected parents to sue their children for
infractions, though the vagueness of the law — it does not spell out the
frequency of visits — has raised some doubts about its enforceability.

“The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety,” despite its ham-handedness, tries
to address the root causes of loneliness.

It urges children to throw their parents a birthday party each year and
listen attentively to their stories from the past. It even asks that
children help widowed parents remarry, a task that some parents found
objectionable.

“I would be really embarrassed if my son tried to help me remarry,” said
Xu Zhihao, a retiree who was sunning himself with friends in a Beijing
park on Wednesday. “That’s not part of Chinese tradition.”