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1 results

  • 6 - A Constitutional Agenda

  • from Part II - Building the Nation through Restructuring the Family
  • Yue Du, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    State and Family in China
    Published online:
    29 October 2021
    Print publication:
    11 November 2021, pp 203-241

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 traces the logic beneath state-sponsored reconfiguration of family order in general, and generational relations in particular, within the context of China’s constitutional transformation in the first half of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, an empire that “ruled through the principle of filiality” became a modern republic that denounced the father–son cardinal bond in power succession and abandoned generational hierarchies in laws. Social practice on the ground witnessed gradual and uneven changes; but state builders, from late Qing legal reformers to Nationalist lawmakers, persisted in the statist direction they designed for China, in the hope of atomizing individual citizens as the first step to connect them directly to the state. The generation-long building of new sociolegal mechanisms, while obstructive to the formation of a stable political order in the short term, laid the foundation for the rebirth of China as a modern state.