Chinese Ethics and the Spirit of Laws: Filial Piety and the Construction of Rights in Contemporary China

• In Event: ACCCJ Chinese Societies, Law and Justice

Abstract

Using survey data collected from over 1,000 college students across three provinces in China, I examine a central feature of the Confucian tradition, namely, filial piety, and its relations to attitudes towards rights and liberty.
As the previous literature suggests, the relations between traditional values such as filial piety and attitudes toward rights and liberty in China are more complicated and nuanced than conventionally conceived, especially given the rapidly changing social and political conditions in contemporary China. Whether traditional values continue to inform the traditional conception of rights that Perry (2008) attributed to China becomes an evolving empirical question that this study is intended to explore, rather than a cultural phenomenon assumed to be immutable and factual. Further still, little is known about how exactly filial piety may shape rights consciousness, specifically, in what relation to other traditional values, to modern values, as well as to other socioeconomic characteristics such as class, gender, and ethnicity. These are the primary questions that this study is intended to address.

Author

• Kai Lin, University of Delaware