Book contents
- State and Family in China
- State and Family in China
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Ruling the Empire through the Principle of Filiality
- 1 “Parents Can Never Be Wrong”
- 2 Policies and Counterstrategies
- 3 “Parenting All under Heaven on Behalf of Heaven”
- Part II Building the Nation through Restructuring the Family
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - “Parenting All under Heaven on Behalf of Heaven”
State-Sponsored Filiality and Imperial Rulership
from Part I - Ruling the Empire through the Principle of Filiality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2021
- State and Family in China
- State and Family in China
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Ruling the Empire through the Principle of Filiality
- 1 “Parents Can Never Be Wrong”
- 2 Policies and Counterstrategies
- 3 “Parenting All under Heaven on Behalf of Heaven”
- Part II Building the Nation through Restructuring the Family
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 3 shows how the legal mechanisms of state-sponsored filiality integrated with Qing political order. The notion of “parental infallibility” materialized in imperial politics as the logic of attributing power and merit to the emperor and the magistrate who “parented the people,” and liabilities to children-subjects. The principle of “united under the most revered” allowed the empire to effectively organize a top-down chain of delegating parental authority from Heaven the ultimate father to various levels of bureaucratic and familial authorities while channeling political loyalty upwards. The universally duplicatable filial inequality appealed to the emotional attachment between parent and child, especially mother and child, to naturalize political and social hierarchies of almost all kinds. These mechanisms operated correspondingly in li (ritual propriety) and fa (law), not because Chinese law was “Confucianized” or “ritualized” but because both li and fa were molded and instrumentalized to serve the imperial state.
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- State and Family in China , pp. 93 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021