Redefining Filial Piety in Ageing China

About the Lecture: In recent years, the Chinese government's promotion of filial piety as the key component of the “Chinese Dream” has faced resistance from adult self-identified survivors of domestic child abuse, who have taken the lead in sparking an outpouring of anti-parent sentiments on the Internet. These survivors have embraced the Western psychological concept of child abuse and have utilized the reincarnated practice of “speaking bitterness” (known as suku) from China’s Maoist period to voice their grievances publicly, rejecting the government’s definition of filial piety. In this talk, Dr. Xia Zhang analyzes the significant social and cultural changes in contemporary China that have contributed to the emergence of anti-parent sentiments, and then investigates the role of suku as a means of subject production that empowers the survivors to assert their political claims. Dr. Zhang also addresses the complexities and limitations of such empowerment for the child abuse survivors in the context of a rapidly aging Chinese society. 

About the Speaker:  Xia Zhang is an Affiliate Research Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University. She has done research on labor migration, family and children, new/social media, gender and masculinity, and globalization and transnationalism, with a geographic focus on China and East Asia. Her most recent research project focuses on how new media and the transnational circulation of psychological self-help knowledge change the strategies and cultural repertoires that self-identified adult survivors of domestic child abuse employ to resist hegemonic discourses of kinship, morality, and subjectivity in post-reform China. She is a recipient of Early Career Fellowships from Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies and of the Research Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh.