.png)
61 Views
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Oral Presentation Session
Kristin Sangren
PhD Candidate
UC Berkeley
At the end of 2012, the Standing Committee of the 11th National People’s Congress
quietly amended the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of the Rights and
Interests of the Elderly to include Article 18, which included the controversial provision: “Family
members living apart from the elderly shall frequently visit or check-in on (kanwang/wenhou) the
elderly.” In the intervening years, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed by elderly Chinese
petitioning the court to order their children to visit them. This paper takes up the question of
using state law to enforce family intimacy through the legal judgment in the case of Liu v. the
Yans, a civil lawsuit filed by an elderly woman against her two estranged biological children in
Chengdu. Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s methodological image of ‘implosion’
(Haraway 1997; Dumit 2014), the paper examines how this judgment collapses several strains
of considerable import in understanding law and modern China—that of the moral and ethical
force of the law for ordinary Chinese; of China’s different orientation towards ‘legitimate
intrusions’ of the law in intimate life; and of the promise of the ‘Chinese miracle’ and the
problematic excess it left behind (the rural and the elderly). The paper further interrogates
what is at stake in the breakdown of intergenerational intimacy in contemporary China—stakes
that have been conspicuously recognized by the state in its turn towards the rhetoric of ‘filial
piety’ and ‘traditional’ Chinese values.