Extract

For millennia, “ruling all under the heaven by the principle of filial piety” (xiao zhi tianxia) had been seen as the principle for state and family relations. The notion of filial piety not only referred to family relations but was also the ideological basis for political order. Yue Du’s book, State and Family in China: Filial Piety and Its Modern Reform, offers an excellent example of how the Qing state and the republican regime reconfigured and reformed the law and legal institutions to reinforce and reorient the family relations, particularly parent-child relations, for the purpose of solidifying the state legitimacy and to transform the society from an empire to a nation-state.

The existing scholarship on filial piety either focuses on the perspective from the Confucian canon as the fundamental principle for family relations and state ideology, or from emotional bonds and ritual behaviors for generational family relations. Based on solid studies on legal cases and well-conceptualized arguments, the author contributes to the field mainly in three aspects. First, from a local perspective, Du demonstrates a dynamic interaction between state legal institutions and local actors and reveals how the law and legal practices constructed and concretized the abstract notion of filial piety, which had a strong impact on the daily life of villagers. At the same time, with the sponsorship of the state, senior members of some families in villages took advantage of the legal system for their own use. Second, Du suggests that the reinforcement of the principle of filial piety through the legal system was not only important for Qing political legitimacy but also for the effectiveness of bureaucratic operation because of the intertwined concepts of filial piety and loyalty. Third, the author’s insightful term “genderation” sheds light on the nuances in Chinese family relations and is a potentially useful term in the studies of gender and parent-child relations.

You do not currently have access to this article.