China’s revised law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Elderly People took effect last Monday. A clause now stipulates: “Family members living apart from the elderly should frequently visit or send greetings to the elderly persons.”
“I am breaking the law,” some people suddenly realized.
The new law has been controversial. The official media have sung a chorus of praise, as though China has suddenly found a solution to a moral plague. But skepticism abounds among Internet commentators and the public.
Some protest that their employers insist that they work overtime, even on holidays, giving them no chance to go home to see their parents. Even more people complain that they can’t afford to make frequent home visits, and have no choice but to wait until they have a long vacation. And there are pointed comments to the effect that, for decades now, the official media have been extolling those exemplary workers who stay at their posts during the Spring Festival. With the implementation of the new law, they ask sarcastically, are these model workers going to end up in jail? It’s just a joke, of course, since “should” carries no punitive connotations.
I’m reminded of a true story I came across some years ago. A farmer from a poor area scrimped and saved to get his son through college. When his son got a job he got a new telephone number, and his father could not contact him. The father began to worry, walking 10 miles into town every week to call a number that was no longer in use. It never occurred to him that his son had abandoned him. He became more and more anxious, finally turning to the media for help. In the end he found his son, but the young man was infuriated at the loss of face he had suffered. The heartbroken old man had to return alone to his threadbare home.
In recent years, reports of children abandoning or mistreating their parents have filled our TV screens, newspapers and Web sites. Many people lament bitterly the collapse of moral standards in China, seeing this new preoccupation with material advantage as the downside of our rapid economic growth during the last 30-odd years. “If you have money, you can make the devil turn the millstone,” the saying goes, but these days it’s more like money making the millstone turn the devil.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of farmers have been leaving their fields to work in the cities, and a substantial part of the urban population has become mobile, too, leading to the demise of the traditional adage that “when one’s parents are living, one does not travel far.”
What surprises me is that people criticize children for neglecting their parents, but nobody seems to be criticizing the government — but then, maybe that kind of comment is deleted as soon as it is posted.
When I was a boy, during the Cultural Revolution, I furtively read a book that was banned at the time. It was titled “The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety,” and I have never forgotten one story in it. In the Jin dynasty there was an exemplary son named Wu Meng, born to a family too poor to own a mosquito net. When the sting of mosquitoes made it difficult for his father to sleep, Wu Meng took off his shirt and sat by his parents’ bed, letting the mosquitoes bite him and never once swatting them away, so that they had no reason to leave him and bite his parents.
China’s imperial dynasties stressed the importance of being loyal to one’s ruler and country and dutiful to one’s parents, but when the “Paragons” was banned, it meant that, of loyalty and filial piety, only loyalty remained — loyalty to the Communist Party. While the Communist Party now promotes filial piety, it ignores its own history of suppressing it and blames individual behavior for the breakdown of ethical norms, then comes out with a ridiculous legal clause as it fudges its own responsibility as the party in power for the last 63 years.
In March, Zhou Qiang, the party secretary of Hunan Province, was (by prearrangement) elected president of the Supreme People’s Court. When taking office, Mr. Zhou lauded his predecessor, Wang Shengjun, for maintaining “a firm political stand.” What he meant was clear: the Communist Party always retains the power to control China’s laws. He showed greater devotion to the party than to the principle of rule of law.
It may be absurd to have a statute on the books that makes a crime out of infrequent visits to one’s elderly parents, but there are, nonetheless, some ordinary citizens who will realize that they are “breaking the law.” When, on the other hand, our top jurist fails to assert the supremacy of law, he seems not to have the slightest sense that he is, in his own way, violating far more fundamental legal principles.
Yu Hua, the author of “China in Ten Words,” is a guest columnist. This column was translated by Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.
© The New York Times 2013
