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Filial piety in play as courts get involved in private matters
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A SERIES of cases in and around Shanghai is spotlighting a uniquely Chinese approach to legislating the complex relationship between parents and their children. Each case in some way raises a topic that vexes many of us foreigners, who can’t understand why Chinese courts are increasingly mediating in cases between parents and children who don’t get along but still feel a need to be together.
In the West, family members who don’t get along simply avoid each other and that’s the end of the story. What’s more, Western courts would rarely step in to try and mediate such purely personal disputes, and most legislators would never dare to touch the topic for fear of being accused of meddling in people’s private affairs.
But even when personalities repel each other like magnets, in China there seems to be an opposing force that draws such people together when it comes to parents and their children. Of course everyone knows the “force” I’m referring to is the traditional concept of xiao, or filial piety, which is part of the bedrock of Chinese culture.
The most sensational of the three headlines involved a 46-year-old Pudong woman who was ordered to visit her 78-year-old father on a regular basis, even though there were few good feelings between them. In another article, the court backed a company which had fired an employee for traveling to Europe on vacation time that was meant to be used for a family visit.
A third report detailed a Jiangsu judge’s ruling that children who didn’t regularly visit their parents could lose their inheritance rights.
Family disputes occasionally make it into Western courtrooms, especially when they involve sibling disagreement over inheritance. But China has taken the issue to a whole new level by passing laws that actually require filial piety, and giving parents the right to sue when children fail to fulfil their duties.
I found the case of the 46-year-old woman just a tad bizarre, because even the father who sued admitted his relationship with his daughter was a mess and approached a court in 2005 asking it to officially end the relationship. The court refused that request, which perhaps emboldened the man to change his mind a decade later and sue his daughter again seeking financial support and occasional visits.
In the end the court sided with the daughter on the financial issue because the father was earning a relatively comfortable pension. But it still ordered her to visit her father every other month and on major holidays and his birthday. I can’t even imagine what such visits would look like. Perhaps two people sitting in a room trying not to look at each other until enough time has passed that the daughter could comfortably get up and leave.
The judge’s decision was perhaps slightly more reasonable in the second story, since the man who was fired received the punishment for lying about his travel plans when he had applied for home leave. Still, what the man did on his personal time should be his own business, and it seems wrong for a company to specify that employees must use some of their leave each year to visit their parents. Many of my Chinese friends often comment on the strangeness of the Western approach, which often sees the parent-child relationship change to one that looks more like friends after children enter adulthood. That kind of transformation seems far less common in China.
There are also the very real issues of financial and emotional support, since many older parents in these cases lack the money to support themselves and also must deal with loneliness if they have few friends and their children seldom visit. But this idea of having courts step in to legislate child loyalty seems somewhat misguided, and instead perhaps society should encourage retirees to become more independent and also to treat their children like more than just a retirement pension plan.
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