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Proposed Chinese Law Would Require Adult Children to Visit Elderly Parents Regularly

The urbanization of China has changed the nation's familial interactions drastically. Children are no longer living with their parents and grandparents into adulthood, and more old people are moving into apartments by themselves rather than close-knit rural communities.

Young people's values are changing as well. Whereas reverence for the elderly was once an important virtue in Chinese culture, increasingly, the youth are leaving their forebears behind. The result is rampant loneliness and disillusionment, which causes added mental and physical health problems in a population that's already struggling with chronic illness and dementia. One British study of that country's citizens recently called loneliness a "silent killer" for the elderly.

Even without the proposed law in place, there is already a precedent of old people suing their offspring in Chinese courts. Just this month, for instance, a judge in the Shandong Province ordered three women to pay their 80-year-old mother between 350 to 500 renminbi a month (about $53 to $75) after the mother claimed that they

ignored her.

Adult children in China would be required to visit their elderly parents on a regular basis under a proposed amendment to the nation’s Law on Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Aged.

Wu Ming, an official with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, is reported as saying that the amendment would allow elderly parents ignored by their children to go to court to claim their legal rights to be physically and mentally cared for.

China has 167 million citizens over age 60, half of whom live alone without children and 20 million of whom cannot take care of themselves. In traditional Chinese culture, filial piety —respect for one’s parents and ancestors —is one of the paramount virtues. But the longstanding tradition of children caring for aged parents is being challenged by history’s largest huma n migration, in which 130 million Chinese have moved to cities in search of jobs, leaving nearly 60 million growing up apart from one or both parents, according to a recent article in the New Yorker. In effect, capitalism appears to be undermining traditio nal values, and the state’s attempted solution is to legislate morality.

Wang Shichuan, a news analyst quoted by the site , questioned whether a moral issue is susceptible to a legal solution. Wang noted that many adult children work outside their hometowns and have little opportunity to visit their parents