Seniors Day — more reflection than celebration (2)

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Seniors Day — more reflection than celebration (2)

(Shanghai Daily) 17:55, October 12, 2013

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Article 17 also prohibits family members from “overlooking or neglecting the elderly.”

No penalties are specified.

Obliging children to visit their parents is considered absurd and unenforceable by many people, an attempt to legislate personal morality.

“Filial piety is the most important of all virtues and visiting and caring for parents are the basic requirement for a Chinese. I don’t feel good that such basic ethical behavior is regulated by law,” says 29-year-old Jess Wang, a Shanghai local working for a foreign-invested company.

Lisa Jia, a 32-year-old new Shanghai resident from northeast China’s Liaoning Province, says that she will always visit her retired parents or have them live with her in Shanghai for one or two months every year. But she understands those who cannot visit. “It is not easy to spare the time in the fast-paced work environment of Shanghai,” Jia says.

“You cannot simply travel all the way home, have a glance at your parents and then travel back to Shanghai. Surely it’s more difficult after you get married and have two sides of the family,” she adds.

Socialist Gu Xiaoming considers the law a way to encourage young people to care for the elderly, since the law cannot measure filial piety or punish impiety.

“We cannot take the term ‘visit’ as simply a visit, but a chance for us to help the elderly solve their problems and meet their needs as they did when we were young,” says Gu. “These are such trifles compared with what Chinese traditional values required of children.”

The tradition of “raising children for one’s old age” (yang er fang lao, Ñø¶ù•ÀÀÏ) called for children to support their parents when they could no longer work. But that has become almost impossible because of the rapidly aging population, weakening of the extended family, and family planning policies that encourage most people to have only one child.

The group of people who need care is growing much larger and faster compared with the group of caregivers, which is diminishing.

China had more than 194 million elderly (officially defined as at least 60 years old) at the end of 2012, accounting for 14.3 percent of the population, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

That number is expected to reach 243 million by 2020 and 300 million by 2025.