3 - “Parenting All under Heaven on Behalf of Heaven”

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.