A woman surnamed Chu (left), 77, attends the hearing of a case against
her daughter and husband in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu province, on July 1.
Chu's daughter has been ordered to visit her at least once every two months, in
the first case under a new law to protect the elderly.
The sound of Buddhist chants wafts through an annex of the Songtang
Hospice, the first private facility of its kind in Beijing. A group of lay
Buddhists is trying to ease the passage of a recently departed soul of a
patient.
When I first visited this place nearly two decades
ago, the average patient stayed just 18 days. Now, it caters to people who are
not terminally ill, and the average stay is about five years.
China is home to the world's largest aging population,
and its attitudes and treatment of the elderly are changing. In the past, there
was little mention in China of the rights of the elderly. Instead, ancestor
worship and Confucian respect for the elderly were the norm.
But since this summer, Chinese law requires adult
offspring to visit their elderly parents and look after their emotional needs.
A number of cases of parents suing their deadbeat kids for emotional support
have gotten heavy play in the Chinese media.
Law Meets Reality
Upstairs at the hospice, Huang Xuebing is visiting his
mother, who has now been here for around five years and whose health is
declining. Huang visits her here every day, but he still blames himself for not
taking better care of her.
"In China, when you take care of a parent, you
take care of him or her in your home, and you take care of them until they
die," Huang says. "We call this filial piety. If you put a parent in
an old age home, many people consider this unfilial. But we have no
choice."
Huang says he tried to take care of his mother at
home, but the caregivers he hired all quit. Huang's family comes from northeast
China, and his mother's medical insurance will only pay for her treatment in
her home province. So Huang uses all of his mother's pension, plus
contributions from his siblings, to pay for his mother's stay at the hospice.
Huang admits he's struggling to reconcile his
obligations to his mother versus those to society.
"I come here every day, but I have to take time
out from work for it," he says. "When I come here to sit by her
bedside and look after her every day that means that I haven't contributed to
society in any other way, right?"
The challenge of caring for China's elderly is evident
in the demographics. As of last year, China had about eight working-age people
for every senior citizen. By midcentury, there will be only two people
supporting each senior. This is because people are living longer, and they're
having fewer children, in part because of China's one-child policy.
In another room of the hospice, I met a
cheerful-looking 94-year-old retired teacher named Lian Yicheng. She says her
daughter visits her just twice a month, and that's just fine by her.
"If there's nothing wrong, I don't ask her to
come here," she says. "It's a three-hour round trip for her, so a
visit takes up half her day. I tell her I'm fine, I'm alive and kicking, what's
there to come over and see?"
She was separated from her children first during World
War II. When the Japanese army invaded her home town of Wuhan, she fled to the
wartime capital of Chongqing, then known as Chungking. She was separated from
them again during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, so she got
used to fending for herself.
Lian believes that how each person looks after his or
her parents is a matter of individual character. She doesn't think it's
something you can regulate by law.
"It's something you have [to] cultivate
gradually. You can't force it," she says. "My daughter has her work
and her own activities. She can't live in the past, according to the feudal
thinking and Confucian ways of my generation."
Holding On To Tradition
Confucianism held filial piety to be the most
important ethical principle in human relations and the model for other
relations; between husband and wife, ruler and minister, etc. Confucian respect
for the elderly remains a powerful force in Chinese society, but it's a far cry
from what it used to be.
In the past, for instance, many Chinese learned
respect for the elderly from a 13th century collection of stories about 24
models of filial piety. One example is a man named Guo Ju, who was so poor he
couldn't afford enough food for his elderly mother and young son.
So he decided to bury his son alive in his backyard.
He could always have more children later, he reasoned, but he could never have
another mother. The story ends happily, with heaven rewarding Guo for his
filial attitude, so that both his mother and child survive.
A century ago, this interpretation of Confucianism was
already being criticized. The idea of sacrificing a child to save a parent was
lambasted as inhumane and the basis for a slavish deference to authority.
Given the residual influence of Confucianism, says
Songtang Hospice founder Li Wei, the problem of caring for China's elderly is
mainly an economic one, not an ethical one. He says it's not realistic to
expect parents to sue their children for emotional support, and this is why
there have been so few cases going to court.
"An 80-year-old who is no longer independent, who
can no longer walk, how can they go sue someone in court?" he says.
"It's never happened, because our citizens don't have a history of being
litigious."
Li knows a thing or two about caring for the elderly.
During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Li served as a "barefoot
doctor," treating the ill and dying with little training, medicine or
equipment. Since he founded Songtang more than two decades ago, he's seen off
more than 10,000 patients from his hospice. He has even named himself after his
own institution and now goes by "Li Songtang."
Li argues that most of the people who bring their
parents to his hospice are not unfilial children.
"The ones who are really unfilial are those who
put their old folks in a coffin made of four concrete walls," he says.
"They go off to do their work, and leave the old person all alone and
lonely. This kind of thing happens all the time."
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