TRADITIONAL CHINESE FAMILY

Traditional Chinese Family

Traditional Chinese Family

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to discover the forces that undermine the traditional Chinese family. These beliefs can explain a lot about the actions and customs of traditional Chinese families. The beliefs being that, one, women are not equal to men, two, children should obey their parents and put the family's interests before their own, and three, people should follow the Confucian idea of the five relationships. Women in Chinese society are not seen as equals to their male counter parts. This is shown throughout Chinese history by actions such as foot binding, the family roles of a women, and females not being able to carry out the ancestral rituals. Foot binding started somewhere around A.D. 950 the Chinese started binding women's feet to keep them small.

Source Undermining the Traditional Chinese Family

The traditional Chinese family, or jia (colloquial: jiatíng), called a "chia" by a few English writers, was a patrilineal, patriarchal, prescriptively virilocal kinship group sharing a common household budget and normatively extended in form. (Wight 1940) Long before the industrialization and the rise of communism, Chinese civilization has been built peculiarly on the basis of family. The reason is that Chinese people have the unique family value system that would put family above their individual and personal needs; this is what we called familism. The value was implicitly shown in the Chinese word for family is the pictorial representation of several people under a roof, meaning possibly man, wife and children. According to the Chinese proverbs, "If there are no families, there will be no country", it seems that Chinese made familism even more central in that society than in most.

The Chinese believed that children should obey their parents and put family interests before their own interests. This is known as the filial piety, a Chinese idea. The filial piety is the duty and respect children owe their parents. "From birth, children learned to put the family's interests before their own wishes. Parents expected complete obedience and respect." This is a very important Chinese thought and there is even a Chinese folk tale about it. In the folk tale a dutiful son, Koh ku is willing to let his own children starve to feed his mother. The story ends when the god being so pleased with Koh Ku's filial piety that he is given a pot of gold. Children owe respect to ...