There are a couple of stories in this week’s Beijing Review that deal with the care of elderly people in China.  The first thing that struck me was the honest engagement with the problem: Beijing Review is a government-funded magazine designed to get the Party’s view out into the world.  But it has, like other Chinese media outlets in the past decade, also become  more professional, not just spouting happy talk about the "superiority of socialism" (which is, I guess, so outlandish a notion that it is almost never mentioned anymore), but presenting complex stories with criticisms of government policy and  social conditions.

      The stories remind me of how hard it is to live up to Confucian ethical standards.  It is fairly cliche to say that in a "Confucian society" filial piety requires children to take care of parents.  Traditionally, this social expectation meant that Chinese societies had fewer nursing homes.  But that is changing significantly in contemporary PRC. 

    This story discusses how family expectations have changed – children are now too busy with work to put in the time to care for parents; and parents are too jealous of their individual autonomy (how "Western"!) to want to lose control of their home life by moving in with their children.  The sub-head of the story sums up the situation: "China’s elderly are increasingly
looking to old-age homes to spend their retired lives. But the choices are
far from satisfactory".

     An accompanying interview with Yuan Xinli, Deputy Director of the Office of China’s National Committee on Aging, raises issues that are familiar to American baby-boomers struggling with finding ways to care for their parents:

 Presently, there are over 40,000 care centers for senior
citizens in China. The number of beds in these centers accounts for only 0.8
percent of China’s total aging population. According to the international
standard, the rate should reach 5 to 8 percent to meet practical needs.
Moreover, most Chinese nursing homes are small. The largest one in Beijing has
only about 500 beds. China therefore has a long way to go to set up more and
better homes for the aged.

     Note how the metric is "the international standard," not some expectation drawn from "traditional" views of children caring for parents directly.  Confucianism, it would seem, is largely irrelevant to the discussion.

    I do not mean to be critical here.  Confucius sets a high standard.  He expects children to be directly involved with the daily care of their aging parents.  It’s not clear to me that this is possible under conditions of modernity, where ever growing demands for productivity in the workplace take children out of their family lives. 

    I have been there myself: last year as my mother was dying from cancer, I moved her out of her town to a house near my own, and I tried to help oversee her hospice care.  But I was not with her all that much; my sister took on the daily care responsibilities.  I did not live up to what Confucius would expect of a son finding his own humanity by participating in the daily care of his mother.  Indeed, this passage often ran through my mind:

When Adept Yu asked about honoring parents, the Master said: "There days, being a worthy child just means keeping parents well fed.  That’s what we do for dogs and horses.  Everyone can feed their parents – but without reverence, they may as well be feeding animals.  (2.7).

    A bit harsh, perhaps, but a reminder of what Confucian humanity requires.