Civilized Families. Discourses of 'Filial Piety' in China in the Age of the 'China Dream'.

• Applicant: Dr. Marius Meinhof
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424193223

In recent years, government propaganda and public debates in China have started to promote traditional Chinese values. This is most visible in discourses on filial piety towards one’s parents, in Chinese: xiao (孝). Xiao, understood as a key virtue of Chinese culture, has long been pervasive in intellectual debates and everyday life discourses. The fact that xiao is now being picked up as a part of state propaganda is of high theoretical interest for understanding social change in China; firstly, because studies of governmentality in reform-era China (from 1979) mainly focus on projects of the state to create a modern population, thus neglecting the relevance of discourses on Chinese tradition, and secondly, because the appellation of xiao is part of a general trend towards revaluing and rediscovering Chinese tradition and thus part of an overall change in the Chinese governmentality regime. At the same time, this raises the theoretically and empirically promising question of how exactly the discourse of socialist modernization and the iconoclastic heritage of the May Fourth Movement embedded within it can be brought together with the appellation of traditional Chinese subjects.The project will use ethnographic and videographic data to construct an empirically grounded theory of the use of traditional culture in the Chinese governmentality regime, especially the culture of filial piety, xiao. By combining different types of qualitative data, the project will research and compare state discourse, popular discourses, and practices of actual Chinese families. The guiding research question is: How is filial piety constructed and negotiated between state discourses and everyday practices? This question is divided into three sub-questions:- How do state discourses on filial piety and civilized families bring together the aim of creating a modern population and the notions of Chinese or Asian traditional identity?- How are intergenerationality and kinship, and especially the notion of filial piety, imagined and negotiated in everyday life practices and discourses in Chinese families?- Are there similarities or contradictions between the notion of filial piety and kinship/family in state discourses and in popular discourses or practices? For example, to which degree do state discourses and popular discourses mutually appropriate each other’s arguments and constructs in relation to filial piety?The working hypothesis of the project is that state discourses in China designate subjects and families as “modern” and “civilized” but at the same time “traditional” and “Chinese” in order to solve a tripartite problem of “intergenerationality,” “kinship,” and “welfare state,” which appears to be as urgent in China as in EU countries. Promoting intergenerational solidarity through discourses on xiao may be a governmentalist strategy to relieve the emerging welfare state.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants