PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter employs discourse analysis to show how state discourses in China depict the promotion of filial piety xiao as part of a larger civilizational project. We argue that state discourses extend xiao so that xiao within the family is depicted as a source of relations between citizens and the state, relations between younger and elder generations in the overall society, and as a basis for civil behavior in public. Based on the extension of xiao, an appellation of xiao as a principle organizing care and respect for the elderly in general, beyond support in kinship networks, takes place. Thus, the promotion of xiao as a traditional virtue of the Chinese people is at once part of a shift in Chinese state discourse toward tradition since the turn of the century, and at the same time connected to older discourses on improving the spiritual civilization of the Chinese people. This is put into practice through various localized approaches that are often based on high-modernist administrative tools, as we will show on the example of local volunteering projects.