The preceding chapters superseded the conventional model of filial piety in studies of intergenerational relations to capture novel and nuanced features under neo-familism that often appear to be multi-directional or even self-contradictory. Despite the surge in national wealth during the last three decades, Chinese youth still heavily rely on parental support for marriage (Chapter 2 by Davis and Chapter 3 by Fong et al), and cannot afford to marry someone of whom their parents disapprove (Chapter 3 and Chapter 9 by Jankowiak). Young couples cannot raise their children without critical assistance—in many cases full-time work—from their parents (Chapter 4 by Thomason and Chapter 5 by Qi) who, in turn, must make radical adjustments to adapt to their new role as floating grandparents if they migrate to the cities to take care of their grandchildren (Chapter 5). Yet, it is equally noteworthy that parents and grandparents also increasingly rely on the younger generations for emotional and spiritual support rather than for financial or labor assistance (Chapters 4 and 5). Parents whose only child has died face an identity crisis because, both literally and spiritually, they had regarded their only child as part of themselves (Chapter 8 by Shi). Yet the aging urban parents or grandparents also feel an urgency to live a life of their own, and thus, they regard their grand-parenting obligation as a burden (Chapter 6 by Huang). The ambiguity, ambivalence, and in some cases even antagonism across generational lines are intensified in the caring, rearing, and education of the precious child of the third generation, which is the most important and most challenging familial project, requiring intergenerational collaboration and increasing the density and intensity of mutual dependence and solidarity among three or even four generations (Chapters 4, 5, 6, and Chapter 7 by Xiao).
Against the background of all these family-life actions and dramas, there is a new shared family ideal of prosperity, happiness, and self-development for all members of the domestic group. This ideal can only be partially realized by the self-sacrifice of some members for the betterment of other members (Chapters 4 and 5). Although a number of contemporary features of urban family life seem to have emerged under Maoism (Chapter 9), they have been reinterpreted and recalibrated in the early twenty-first century as part and partial of the ongoing trend of neo-familism. The complexity of neo-familism is
Elsewhere, I examine the contours of Chinese neo-familism as social practice (2016, 2018 and Chapter 1) and took a close look at the decisive role of the party-state in shaping the Chinese family through family policy making (Chapter 10). In the present chapter I shift my focus to neo-familism in three distinct types of social discourse—the popular, official, and intellectual.
By discourses on neo-familism I refer to what is said about family values, behavioral norms, an ideal family life, and the conceived relationship among the individual, family, society, and the state. These discourses invoke traditional familism to a certain degree, but in one way or another, they also are engaged in tensions or conflicts with traditional familism as well as with one another. Like the social practices of neo-familism, the discourses on neo-familism are essentially a reworking of traditional familism, but with new agendas, values, and ethical norms. Admittedly, all of these are the ought-to-be conditions in people’s minds and are reflected in dialogues instead of in actual social actions. Yet, they may guide or even change social actions to a certain degree, and thus they constitute a kind of discursive reality. This is particularly the case with respect to the official discourse that is sponsored and promoted by the powerful party-state and that is meant to be a tool of governance.
1 The Popular Discourse on Neo-Familism
The popular discourse on neo-familism represents family values, life attitudes and self-evaluations with respect to family life among Chinese individuals, which can be easily found in social surveys and scholarly research. A number of recent studies on family values have found that a large majority of Chinese regard the interests of the family as a whole as more important than the interests of the individual family members. Based on her collection of data gathered from nearly all major survey studies of family values since 2000, family sociologist Xu Anqi, who is arguably the leading Chinese authority on family values, concludes: “More people tend to agree that the overall interests of the family are above their personal interest; that intergenerational interdependence is more important than the intimacy of the husband and wife; and that family values are more important than the values of personal development” (Xu 2017: 6). Data from the 2006 China General Social Survey and from a 2008 survey in Shanghai and Lanzhou demonstrate that the primacy
Confucian familism emphasizes the divide between the family/kinship group and the outside world of unrelated people. A moral relativism is employed in dealing with in-group and out-group relations as well as in dealing with in-group members who are differentiated in terms of their relational closeness to the ego, identified by Fei Xiaotong (Fei 1992 [1948]) as the “differentiated mode of association” (差序格局). Turning outwardly, the unreserved devotion to one’s family and the value of self-sacrifice for one’s immediate family members translate into a lower degree of social trust in strangers and in social institutions as well as a degree of political apathy. Political scientist Edward Banfield (1958) refers to this as amoral familism. Recent survey research shows that values of Confucian familism continue to play the role of reducing social trust in public life. The newly emerging elements of social risks and the precarious labor market have resulted in lower social trust among urban families, as opposed to the social trust among their counterparts in the countryside, despite that fact that the former are more frequently and deeply embedded in interactions with unrelated people (Lian and Xiong 2016).
Nevertheless, younger respondents in the above-mentioned surveys display weaker altruism toward family members than do their parents (see, e.g., Liu 2011). Another generational difference is that younger Chinese have begun to make a distinction between family happiness and individual happiness, and they are reluctant to sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of the interests of their extended family (Kang 2012; Wang 2017). Through fieldwork and survey research, sociologist Becky Hsu has observed that young and old Chinese both make sense of life and define the notion of happiness in the
In the village community where I have conducted longitudinal field research since the late 1980s, both young and old villagers since the late 1990s have referred to the family as the only reliable safety net; this is in clear contrast to the consensus from the 1950s to the late 1980s among village youth who wanted to break away from the constraints of the patriarchal family and kinship. Under rural collectivization during the Maoist era, one’s livelihood and life chances primarily depended on the success or failure of the rural collective, which directly contributed to the sharp decline in parental authority, the rise of youth autonomy, an early family division, and the widespread trend to form of nuclear families (Yan 2003). After decollectivization in 1983 and the combined impact of the market economy and the process of individualization in the 1990s, villagers found themselves struggling in the highly competitive and precarious society without the former safety net of the rural collectives and other provisions of public goods from the state. By default, they returned to the family, especially for intergenerational support and solidarity, as the only means to deal with the risks and challenges they faced. As Mr. Wang noted: “I am sure you will find a lot of problems in each household, all kinds of problems. How do these problems get resolved? The family! Family problems, family solutions (家庭问题，家庭解决). That’s it. No one outside the family can help you” (quoted in Yan 2018: 182–183). The gist of his comment is that the family is of prime importance because it is the only source of assistance to deal with the many difficulties that villagers face, and this is why people continue to think and act in terms of the family. “Family problems, family solutions” was a motto widely shared among the villagers whom I interviewed, and they
My son is attending a very good primary school, and my little girl was just accepted into a prestigious pre-school. Our regular income doesn’t even cover their education, so we have to have second jobs and we also have to ask for additional help from my parents. I swore to myself that my children would not grow up like me—you know, poorly educated and only fit for manual labor. They are attending the best schools in our city and they are doing well. … My wife and I are already working two jobs and we have no time to take care of our kids, so we need my mother’s help. We don’t earn enough money to pay all our bills so we also need help from my father’s income. My parents never complain, but I know they’re exhausted. You have to believe me. We want to be filial children, but we have to keep exploiting our parents!
Cited in yan 2018: 188
Mr. Guan’s testimony confirms the above-mentioned major findings from survey research, but it includes as well the additional dimension of anxiety, stress, and guilt. Mr. Guan had been an ambitious and self-driven youth who worked hard to break away from the traditional life trajectory that his parents had followed, but only ten years later he was forced back onto a very similar track. He was very disappointed with his own life, but he shifted his dreams
2 The Official Discourse on Neo-Familism
The second type of discourse consists of official views on the national project of family construction that are delineated through the top leadership of the ccp and through all sorts of government propaganda, including a surge in quasi-scholarly publications. In the official ideology, the Chinese party-state once took a rather hostile stand toward traditional familism and carried out political campaigns attacking belief in ancestor worship and traditional values such as filial piety. Admittedly, this highly critical discourse against familism has never been fully translated into social practice. As I note in the preceding chapter, the party-state took a pragmatic statist approach in dealing with the family institution and, through laws and government policies, it radically changed the traditional family in some respects but also preserved some of its functions in other respects, all depending on what would best serve the party-state’s national agenda of political stability and economic development during any given period. The early twenty-first century was the first time, however, that the party-state ended its critique of traditional familism and took a sharp turn to openly promote some key elements of traditional familism. This is what I refer to as the official discourse on neo-familism, which so far has developed in two distinct phases.
The first phase is highlighted by the term “harmonious family” (和谐家庭) which can be seen as a byproduct of the ccp’s push to build a harmonious socialist society, a strategic goal that was first put forward at the Fourth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the cpc in September 2004. Hu Jintao, general secretary of the ccp at that time, mandated that a harmonious society and a scientific view of development would be the two key concepts of governance defining his leadership. To build a harmonious society, one had to begin by building a harmonious family. This point was most clearly stated by Hu Jintao in a 2007 speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress and thereafter in a 2011 speech to the twenty-eighth study meeting of the Politburo of the ccp Central Committee, when he called for new family construction policies to build a harmonious society (Zhu and Chen 2013). Meanwhile, the idea of a harmonious family was widely advocated through the official propaganda and in politically motivated scholarly accounts, with a focus on conflicts in family
Under Hu Jintao, the party-state began to promote the Confucian value of filial piety, the centerpiece of traditional familism, through government-sponsored media and education channels, including numerous posters in public spaces. In 2004, the central government launched a filial-piety emulation campaign, honoring ten people as national exemplars of filial piety and bestowing various titles on another 2,000 people as filial models; this annual campaign continued in subsequent years. In 2010, October was designated by the National Committee on Aging as the “Month to Respect Elders” and instructions were issued that volunteers and ordinary citizens were to perform acts of filial piety. In 2012, the All-China Federation of Women joined with several government agencies to publish the “The 24 New Paragons of Filial Piety,” an updated version of a fourteenth-century collection of parables on filial devotion. By the end of 2012, the government had amended the 1996 Law on the Rights of the Elderly to require that adult children regularly visit their parents (for an insightful analysis of state efforts to promote filial piety, see Zhang 2017). Public service advertising (psa) is a new official tool of propaganda and it has been widely used in promoting filial piety and the notion of harmonious family, which are presented in the ubiquitous psa boards on urban streets and embedded in television programs including the China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala (Landsberger 2009; and Puppin 2018).
The official discourse on neo-familism entered the second phrase soon after Xi Jinping took over the top leadership position in 2012 as he began to proactively use the family as a tool of governance. Xi first called on party and government leaders to enforce disciplinary control over their family members through a family ethos to solve the problem that many officials had become corrupt due to the influence of family members (Xi 2013). In subsequent years, Xi began to emphasize the importance of traditional familial virtues for the construction of a healthy, civilized, and socialist family (2014, 2015). He delivered a systematically developed version of these ideas at the first national convention of civilized families in 2016. In this speech, Xi defined the goal of building a civilized family to make “thousands and tens of thousands of families into important basic units to work for the development of the state, the progress of the nation, and the harmony of society.” Xi also further developed the framework of “three emphases” (三个注重) that he had first put forward
In Xi’s 2016 speech, the incorporation of familism into patriotism, and by way of this, the incorporation of the family into the state, clearly emerged as the central theme in the official discourse on neo-familism. Thereafter, this theme of submitting the family to the state was amplified and elaborated upon in hundreds of official, semi-official, and semi-scholarly publications as well as in the mainstream media and academic outlets.
In his Chinese New Year speech on February 3, 2019, Xi developed this theme of the family-under-the state by adding two elements. The first is about the dialectical relationship between family prosperity and state development. In all previous speeches Xi first claimed that only when all families became prosperous can the state develop, and he stressed that only when the state is strong and rich can the family be prosperous. In his 2019 speech, however, the order was reversed. Xi stated: “It is in the precious tradition of our nation to fulfill the duty of filial piety in the family and of loyalty to the state. Without the prosperity and development of the state, there will be no happiness and harmony in the family. In a similar vein, without the happiness and harmony of thousands and tens of thousands families, there will be no prosperity and development of the state.” The reversal of the order in these two clauses indicates the state has finally surpassed the family in the official discourse on neo-familism.
Immediately after stating this new formula of putting the state ahead of the family, Xi continued: “We want to make a great effort to advocate the “sentimental disposition of the family-state” (jiaguo qinghuai, 家国情怀) in the entire society, to cultivate and practice core socialist values, and to advocate patriotism, collectivism, and a socialist spirit, thus promoting the integration of loving the family and loving the state and enabling everyone and every
The Confucian notion of the family-state (家国) has long stood out as a powerful social imaginary among the Chinese elite, and, through the trickle-down effect of Confucian education, to a great extent it has been shared by ordinary people. Its origins can be traced back to the feudalist political regime of the Western Zhou dynasty, but its widespread ethical power was formulated during the Han dynasty and continuously reinforced in subsequent dynasties until the turn of the twentieth century (Xu 2015; Jiang 2011). The social imaginary of the family-state is sustained by three more specific notions. The first is the sentimental disposition of the family-state that Xi used in his 2019 speech. It stands for a special inner quality of Confucian literati that highlights both the ethical and the political as well as the emotional connections among the individual, the family, and the state. The second term is the “isomorphism of the family and the state” (家国同构), which literally depicts the sameness of the structural and operational principles of the family and the state. The third term “家国一体” is simple and straightforward, meaning the integration of the family and the state. Working together, these three Confucian notions serve to support and reinforce the social imaginary of the family-state, which in the final analysis places the state above the family.
There is, however, a tension within the notion of the sentimental disposition of the family-state: when the interests of the family conflict with those of the state, should one ethically and emotionally prioritize the family over the state or the other way around? This has long been known as the ethical incompatibility of filial piety to one’s parents/family and loyalty to the emperor/state. From the state perspective, such a tension also speaks to traditional familism as an obstacle to state power. The issue was partially addressed in Confucian ethics in terms of the compromise of “移孝作忠”, which means to appropriate the moral duty of filial piety and to transform it into the political duty of loyalty.
It is noteworthy that in his 2019 speech Xi Jinping also invoked this Confucian solution by stating that Chinese citizens practice filial piety at home but should devote loyalty to the state in public life. Meanwhile, Xi provided a new interpretation of a sentimental disposition of the family-state as patriotism, collectivism, and the socialist spirit. By so doing, Xi, and quickly the entire official discourse on neo-familism (see, e.g., Anhui Daily Commentary Department 2019; People’s Daily Commentator 2019; Guangdong Provincial Center for Xi Jinping Thought 2019), replaced the core value of traditional familism, i.e.,
Indeed, how to reconstruct the family as a site of governance is a central issue in the official discourse on neo-familism. Wang Liming, a leading authority on Chinese civil law and also a party leader at one of the top Chinese universities, clearly states in the title of his widely reprinted essay that the isomorphism of the family and the state is a mode of governance. He argues that the sentimental disposition of the family and the state requires the isomorphism of the family and the state in practice and he emphasizes the sameness or the integration of family love and state love. Wang contends that such a family-state mode of governance means that when the interests of the state and the nation conflict with those of the family and the individual, then one must sacrifice family and individual interests for the sake of state interests (2017). The most straightforward and clear interpretation was offered by Lu Shizhen, a high-ranking party official in the Communist Youth League and a professor in the field of youth and family education. Focusing on Xi’s 2016 call for all party-state agencies to engage in the family construction project, Lu states that Xi’s idea of “constructing and sharing [by the family and the state]” provides a basic blueprint and perspective, that is, of “under the leadership of the party to form a mechanism of family construction that consists of the party, the government, and social organizations [here she is referring to the organizations led by the party-state, such as the Communist Youth League, the All-China Women’s Association, and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions], in which the party provides the leadership, the government takes the initiative, and the social organizations participate. The result is to be shared by the entire society” (Lu 2019). It should be noted that Wang Liming’s article was published by Beijing Daily, the mouthpiece of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the ccp, and Lu Shizhen’s article was published by China Women’s News, the official newspaper of the All-China Women’s Association, which is the leading state agency in charge of the family-construction campaign.
A large number of official interpretations of Xi’s views on the Chinese family were published by mainstream media outlets, such as a co-authored article by the Guangdong Provincial Center of Xi Jinping Thought (2019), and the articles by People’s Daily Commentator (2019), and from the Anhui Daily Commentary Department (2019). At another level and covering a much larger scope, hundreds of articles were published to propagate Xi’s family theory (see, e.g., Gong 2019; Ying 2017; Zhu 2018). A title-search of the National Social Science Data
In other words, the official discourse on neo-familism originated at the very top and has been propagated nationwide at multiple levels of interpretation and dissimilation to serve the party-state’s national agenda of using the family institution as both a site of political governance and a major provider of social welfare services (see Chapter 10 by Yan).
3 The Intellectual Discourse on Neo-Familism
The third type of discourse is advocacy for familism among a group of intellectuals who regard familial ethics and behavioral patterns as an integrated part of the valuable cultural assets that will enable China to define its own unique path to modernity. This is part of the larger intellectual movement of Confucian Revival. To a great extent, this movement fits well with the official discourse on the rejuvenation of China and the China Dream under Xi Jinping.
Whereas the official discourse subsumes familism under patriotism, the intellectual discourse on neo-familism has been carried out on a different trajectory, that is, invoking familism as an indigenous cultural resource to resist individualism and to revitalize traditional (primarily Confucian) culture in Chinese society. One of the earliest attempts was made by Sheng Hong, a political economist, in his 2008 essay “On Familism.” Sheng argues that, in contrast to individualism that is based on the rationality of the individual, familism “thinks” and “acts” in terms of the family as a collective entity. The family as a “thinking subject” has the advantage of transcending the limitations of the individual in two respects: its life goes beyond the life span of an individual and its interests benefit all members of the family instead of only one individual. Sheng Hong provides a real life story to illustrate the advantages of familism. In this case, a family that includes a husband, wife, and two children emigrated from China to the United States and in order to maximize the family’s interests, one member of this particular family had to work so as to support the other three to attend school. The wife chose to work so that her husband could complete his Ph.D. degree at a university and so the two children would also receive
What Sheng advocated was by and large a simple return to traditional familism in the sense that the family is defined as a thinking and acting subject in economic activities and thus it demands submission of loyalty from its members, and the family consists of the necessary hierarchical relations in which the wife is expected to subordinate her individual interests to those of her husband and her children. While noting that in the real-life story that he cites, the wife voluntarily made the decision to work, Sheng completely ignores the institutional impacts of gender-and-generation hierarchy on the female and the junior members in the family group, and he openly expresses a favorable view of the traditional patriarchal family. Such a radical turn to conservatism encountered sharp criticism from Chen Zhiwu, a Yale-based economist, who attempts to debunk Sheng’s economic familism in light of modern individualism (Chen 2008). Other commentaries by Chinese scholars focus on the unprogressive potential of invoking traditional familism (Tianze Institute 2007).
Sheng’s economic familism emerged from the larger intellectual Confucian Revival trend, which began as a scholarly discourse on New Confucianism in the 1990s but thereafter, in the early twenty-first century, developed into a cultural nationalist movement. The overarching theme of this movement is to imagine and to discover China’s unique path to modernity, or, more specifically, China’s path to its rejuvenation as a global power and to the establishment of Chinese subjectivity outside of the Western discourse on political liberalism and individualism. Such a quest for Chinese exceptionalism led its promoters to invoke Confucianism as a new leading ideology in social life—cultural, social, political and economic—practically turning the Confucian Revival into a movement of cultural nationalism and secular religion (Deng and Smith 2018; Kubat 2018). Traditional familism became a perfect fit with the rise of Confucianism as a secular religion.
There are also important differences among Chinese intellectuals who view familism and Confucian ethics in favorable terms. For those who are deeply concerned about the spiritual life of the Chinese people and the perceived moral crises in public opinion since the 1980s (Yan 2021), the restoration of Confucian social imaginary of the individual-family-state-universe (家国天下) is viewed as the only way to regain meaning in life for the individual struggling
Another group of Chinese scholars attempt to define the uniqueness of Chinese society in terms of familism, and by way of Chinese exceptionalism to elaborate on the unfitness of Western values in China. According to Feng Longfei, Western bioethics faces a crisis because it is rooted in the values of individualism and liberalism; by contrast, Confucian familism defines the family as the basic ethical entity and thus it can resolve the ethical problems found in Western bioethics. The key to the advantages of Confucian familism lies in the priority of the interests and the good of the family community over the interests and the good of the individual. In the case of a patient’s right to know, Confucian familism encapsulates all personal relations into the family and, in the case of curing and caring for a patient, it asks all family members to make a collective decision on behalf of the patient. It emphasizes the values of harmony, solidarity, and the wholeness of the family, a decision-making mechanism that is superior to the Western value of a patient’s right to know (Feng 2018). The Chinese notion of the isomorphism of the family and the state has the advantage of avoiding the opposition between state and society in the modern West and represents a more effective mode of governance as well as
Such a favorable view of familism as the basis of the Chinese mode of governance has been pushed to an extreme, in contrast to the British mode of governance that is based on the notion of a social contract. As the Chinese state is in essence the extended family of its people, state leaders are bound by the two major responsibilities of the family head: to ethically educate and cultivate its citizens and to create happiness for its citizens. In return, the citizens are obligated to obey the state leaders and to contribute to the prosperity of the big family of the Chinese state. As the Hong Kong sar is part of this family-state, the people of Hong Kong do not have a Western type of social contract with the ccp and the central government; what they have, like people in other parts of China, is a relationship between the members and the leader of the big family (Bian 2019: 196). The Chinese family provides a protective umbrella for its members in numerous ways and thus enables the self-development of the individuals. Legal reforms during the reform era have been unduly influenced by Western individualism, creating contradictions between familial practices in real life and individualistic norms in the legal codes, such as the confusions and conflicts caused by the individualization of property rights regarding family and conjugal properties. There would be no conflicts between individual development and family interests if a familial perspective were the basis of the legal reforms (Xia 2016).
Equally noteworthy is that traditional familism, especially its key notion of the isomorphism of the family and the state, had long been the target of intellectual critiques for being part of a patriarchal cultural and political despotism that existed in imperial China and throughout the twentieth century (Deng 1994; Glosser 2003; and Zhao 2018; for a recent example, see Xie and Li 2003). The intellectual movement of cultural nationalism and the Confucian Revival completely reversed such critiques, effectively making familism the reborn phoenix of the early twenty-first century. Despite isolated attempts by liberal intellectuals to reiterate the negative impact of familism on public life due to its inherent political apathy (Zhang 2011), the dominant voice is to praise familism for providing a foundational identity for the China Dream (Wang 2016) and cultural capital for a moral reconstruction among the citizenry (Cheng 2015, Wang 2017).
4
To summarize, the three types of neo-familism discourse share a favorable view of the collective power of the family group and the collectivist values of familism, but they also differ from each other in some important respects. In the popular discourse of neo-familism, the family is valued as the only reliable resource for ordinary people to cope with the increasingly competitive, risky, and precarious workplace in particular and social life in general. The motto “family problems, family solution” reflects the pragmatic resort by default that ordinary people may invoke to solve problems in real life instead of a proactive choice to return to tradition. This ambivalence is best illustrated in the tensions between individualistic and familial values that are revealed in social surveys and individual testimonies in ethnographic research (see also Chapter 6 by Huang and Chapter 7 by Xiao).
In sharp contrast to the discourse on neo-familism among ordinary people, the official and intellectual discourses have a clearly defined political agenda. While the party-state views the family as a site of governance, the intellectual advocates of familism seek to find the cultural resources for and to define the Chinese alternative to modernity and global power. Whereas the official discourse incorporates familism into patriotism, the intellectual discourse invokes familism to resist Western individualism. In both cases, the individual is defined as the instrument or the means by which to reach a higher goal, be it the China Dream or the rejuvenation of Confucian culture. The two discourses are merged into a united force through their shared preference for traditional familism and they support each other with their shared advocacy on behalf of some key Confucian notions, such as the family-state, the sentimental disposition of the family-state, and the isomorphism of the family and the state. Together, they fight against individualism, liberalism, and feminism as misleading Western values that will hinder the rise of China, and, by way of restoring and recalibrating traditional familism, they attempt to reestablish the benevolent image of patriarchy in the family and the paternalist polity in the state.
There is a visible gap between the values of Confucian familism promoted by the party-state and conservative intellectuals on the one hand and the pragmatic neo-familism discourse among ordinary people on the other. Yet, as the party-state has drastically expanded its social welfare programs in the new century in order to mitigate the surge in inequality of the 1990s (Shen, Wang, and Cai 2018), a new image of a paternalist state has been created. For example, the party-state’s policy decision to abolish agricultural taxes and levies in 2005 and the establishment of the New Rural Old Age Insurance Program in
Consequently, the elite Confucian concepts of the sentimental disposition of the family-state and the isomorphism of the family and the state have regained their ground in popular culture, gradually affecting the mentality of ordinary people. A good example is the song “Guojia” (国家, the State) that was first sung by Hong Kong movie star Jacky Chan in 2009 in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Its lyrics skillfully depict a symbiotic relationship between the family and the state, with a reiterated central message: “The family is the smallest state, the state is made of numerous families” and concluding that having a strong state is a precondition for having a rich family. This song has been hugely influential as it has been performed in all major shows in the official media during the past decade, so much so that even commentators at several major newspapers have cited the lyrics of “the family is the smallest state …” in essays amplifying Xi Jinping’s 2019 speech on the sentimental disposition of the family-state (Anhui Daily Commentary Department 2019; People’s Daily Commentator 2019; Guangdong Provincial Center for Xi Jinping Thought 2019).
In the contemporary world, it is common to view and define the family as the smallest cell in a society, but by no means the smallest cell in the state. The lyrics in the 2009 song “Guojia” about the family being the smallest state and the later official adaptations of the expression effectively denied the boundaries between the family, as a private haven of the individual, and the state, as the public entity of political, legal, and military power, and by so doing, society was pushed out of the relationship between the family and the state.
This new imagery of the family as the smallest state encounters little difficulty in its journey of dissemination because it derives from the Confucian notion of the isomorphism of the family and the state. It is therefore logical that familism should be incorporated into patriotism, and, as Xi Jinping clearly states, one’s family ideals can only be realized when the national China Dream is realized. It is plausible that, as time goes by, and more importantly, as the party-state promotes its image as a benevolent and paternalist head of the big family of the Chinese nation by way of a newly recalibrated official moral
Yet, I cannot help but wonder what will happen to the public-private divide in Chinese society if the three discourses converge into a more or less unified version. The same question applies to the family and the Chinese individual as well. I have observed a dual transformation of private life by the early 1990s, that is, the family became a private haven for individuals and individuals also gained their own private space within the family institution (Yan 2003). If “the family is the smallest state” (or more logically, the smallest cell of the state), will the private life sphere of the Chinese people again be transformed? Is it possible that the inverted family might be re-inverted and the post-patriarchal intergenerationality we explore in this volume be reversed back to the old patriarchal order in the name of classic filial piety? These are big and unanswerable questions at the present time. But given the radical and deep changes in family ethics and practices, especially the shift in the foci of family life from ancestors to children/grandchildren and the rising awareness of individual rights among both the senior and junior generations (see the preceding chapters, and Yan 2015, 2016, 2017/18), the return of Confucian familism and patriarchy in real social practice seems to be unlikely. But, the tensions between what can be said in ideology and what can be done in social practices are acute and will likely be intensified in the perceivable future. This is another reason I refer to the ongoing trend of family change as neo-familism.
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