Here’s a story from today’s NYT:

For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone
whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money
or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket
change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched
canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents
with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s
contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a
dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the
pair together as a married couple.

 The reporting takes some strange turns, grave-robbing and that sort of thing, but I picked up on this point: 

In some villages, a son is eligible for such a spouse if he is 12 or
older when he dies. None of the people interviewed considered the
custom shameful or overly macabre. Instead, it was described as a
parental duty to a lost child that reflected Confucian values about
loyalty to family.

 I think I can say with some confidence that this practice, termed minghun, is not mentioned in the Analects.  It’s another example of how "actually exiting Confucianism" takes on a variety of forms, some of which might be rather surprising for the original author.  A Chinese anthropologist suggests as much:

Yet Professor Guo [Yuhua] emphasized that the values of Confucianism, later
blended with Buddhism and Taoism, are the basis of folk customs like
minghun, which share a reverence for family.

 I would also add: blended with local customs.

     But the thing I want to highlight here is this: minghun demonstrates the Confucian obligation that parents have for children.  We usually think of Confucianism as demanding absolute authority of elders over children, especially fathers over sons.  Clearly, however, the people who practice minghun believe fervently that they, as parents, have a deep and abiding duty to do the right thing by their children.  And this is a socially generalized sense of duty: no one in the local area sees any of this as unusual.  It is what you do.  It is what a parent owes a child.

    Confucian duty is thus a generational two-way street.  Children should attend to their relationships with their parents; but parents must also do the same for their children.  That is, after all, in keeping with what Confucius himself said was his "greatest ambition:"

To comfort the old, to trust my friends, and to cherish the young. (Analects 5.25)

NB – Here is a nice photo that accompanied the story: