Abstract
This article, based upon 199 police reports of disobedience cases in Republican Beijing, examines the relationship between family and state in modern China. It argues that these cases, on the one hand, helped the family transfer the domestic crises to the state, and on the other hand, consolidated the state cult of filial piety and facilitated the everyday intervention of the state into society. But the collusion between family and state also led to some unexpected consequences, in which the state's representative institutions such as the police and the reformatory, with their availability and affordability, actually increased the visibility of filial impiety.
Chong Peng Shi was probably one of the most beleaguered mothers in Republican (1912–1949) Beijing. 1 Between 1918 and 1930, she lodged at least nine official complaints to the police and the court, repeatedly accusing her son Guangxiu of disobedience at home. This made Guangxiu a regular visitor to the reformatory and prison for correction and punishment for over a decade. 2 Mrs. Chong was not the only parent who attempted to solve a domestic conflict by asking the authorities to intervene. Hundreds of parents went to police stations to accuse their sons—and occasionally their daughters-in-law—of various forms of misbehavior and vice, resulting in allegations of “disobedience,” “filial impiety,” or “not following family instructions.” 3 The resulting case files, around 200 in number, are currently preserved at the Beijing Municipal Archive (BMA) and provide historians with a precious opportunity to examine the relationship between family and state in Republican China. 4
Family has been a main focus for scholars working on the history of Republican China. Earlier scholarship addressed the rebellion of New Culture intellectuals and youths against the patriarchy and emphasized their struggles, both in discourse and in practice, to establish the nuclear family, with free love and free marriage at its core. 5 In the past two decades, scholars have begun to introduce the state into the picture, formulating new visions for understanding its relationship to the family. Notably, Susan L. Glosser, a family historian of modern China, insightfully argues that during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937), the Nationalist government, in addition to the New Culture youth, played a dominant role in advancing the xiao jiating (small family) ideal with a magnitude of intervention unheard of under its imperial predecessor. The goal of the government, however, was not to break down the family but to reformulate it “as the essential building block of a new China.” 6 However, similar to many other scholars who work on the subject, Glosser mostly attends to the conjugal relationship and marriage to develop her argument. 7 Parent-child relations, regrettably, have not gained the scholarly attention that they deserve.
Some legal historians, on the other hand, have turned their attention to generational topics and thus enriched our understanding of the relationship between family and state in Republican China. 8 They, in one way or another, have suggested that parent-child relations, no less than other familial relations, played a key role in the making of modern China. As the influence of the imperial legacy waned, the realm of law went through some highly dramatic changes in ideology and practice in the Republican era. The state, in need of individual citizens to serve the interests of society and itself, inexorably liberated youths from the hands of their parents. As Yue Du concluded, the state “competed with parents over the control of individual citizens, curtailed parental power, and endorsed children's challenge of parents.” 9
The present article benefits from the insights of these scholars. But it also formulates different questions and offers new observations. To start with, this study mainly focuses on the state's discipline of rebellious sons through such institutions as the police and the reformatory. It especially emphasizes the role that the police played in the process. This modern force was not only the first responder at the scene of parent-child conflicts, it was also responsible for triaging cases and prescribing actions, dismissing the case forthwith, sending the offender to the reformatory, or forwarding the case to court. Thus, when the Republican state intervened in generational conflicts, the police force, more than any other institution, was the very embodiment of this spirit.
Relying on police reports of filial impiety as the primary source, this study presents a different picture of state intervention from that drawn by previous scholarship. The state, in its march toward modern governance, instituted the police, the reformatory, and other facilities to consolidate its microscopic control of the rapidly expanding society and its members. But when responding to filial impiety, the police arbitrated conflicts in a way much more in line with imperial governance than one might have expected from a modern law enforcement agency. The police force itself was a recent invention, and the mechanisms for the detention and reformation of disobedient sons were new, too. But the core ideology behind such mechanisms was still centered on the traditional moral principle of filial piety. Contrary to what scholars have concluded about the state's role in curbing parental authority, the police explicitly and continuously favored the parents over the son, even when it realized that the parents had wronged their offspring. In this sense, the ways in which the police processed cases of filial impiety represented continuity rather than rupture with the imperial management of families in society.
Following this line, this article argues that the relationship between state and family in Republican China was more of a “tactical collusion” than a competition. Jacques Donzelot used this term to describe the relationship between family and state since the eighteenth-century France, in which both parties reached a tacit agreement on the confinement and reformation of undesirable family members in state institutions. By doing so, both sides achieved what they each expected, namely, domestic harmony and family honor on the one hand, and preservation of the social order and reformation of individuals on the other. 10 Similarly, the accusation and handling of filial impiety in Republican Beijing also created a tight bond between family and state. For the state's part, one of its modern governance missions was to detect the “wicked citizens,” to use Yamin Xu's phrase, in every corner of society and recast them into able-bodied and productive laborers who would contribute to state building. 11 Accusations of filial impiety placed unruly sons squarely in this category of citizens and thus legitimized the state's infiltration into the household. This put a burden on the state both administratively and fiscally, but it actually cemented the deeply rooted notion of filial piety—which was deemed by many intellectuals as an evil holdover of the feudal past, unfit for the modern era—at the most basic level of society. As a matter of fact, in a broader context, the state not only disciplined unruly sons on behalf of parents, it also intervened in families troubled by poverty, vagrancy, or mentally ill members. By redefining domestic or individual problems as social ones in need of regulation and correction, the state not only deeply changed family dynamics, it also achieved, or at least attempted to, its goal of maintaining social order and consolidating its governance in a paternalistic manner.
At the same time, individual families, rich or poor, native or migrating, took advantage of these institutional resources intended to serve the greater good to advance their own agendas. In the eyes of parents, when conflicts occurred, the police, the reformatory, and other official institutions that the state had established were just as available and affordable, if not more so, as the help and support they sought from relatives, neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Thus, if, according to Jonathan K. Ocko, “to bring a child before the court was to confess failure publicly” in late imperial China, parents in the Republican era showed no reluctance to admit their failures, often repeatedly, and to surrender their authority to the state. 12 Whether out of despair or deliberation, they even elaborated some strategies, such as portraying themselves as victims or composing a self-contradictory narrative about a conflict, to humbly appeal to the state and gain what they wanted. In this sense, they seemed to have inherited some of the life wisdom of their predecessors under imperial rule, who willingly exposed their vulnerabilities in exchange for state protection. In the end, by taking unfilial sons to the police for discipline, parents removed, however temporarily, disruptive elements from the family and transferred their economic, emotional, and moral crises to the state. This created more space for the family to gain a foothold as a viable unit in the bustling city. But it also exposed the family to the pervasive penetration of the modern state, leading to the surrender of its autonomy day by day.
Ironically, because of gains and pains on both sides, it was eventually not generational conflicts per se but the intertwining of family and state that defined filial impiety in the Republican era. When, and indeed because, the state made its institutions highly available, accessible, and affordable to mitigate conflicts, parents actually became less tolerant of their sons and went to the police more frequently. Disagreements on trivial domestic matters or petty bickering that previously had not necessarily required state intervention generated accusations easily and quickly. But when the state changed its policies and rescinded some of the benefits it provided, the number of reports in which parents dropped the charges of disobedience quickly increased. This revealed the extent of the family's dependence on the state, but it also showed its agency and the flexibility with which it accommodated itself to reality in order to survive and prosper.
This article is accordingly structured into three sections. The first two parts focus on the state's apparatus for corralling wicked sons, namely the Republican police force and the reformatory, examining each against the background of modern notions of state governance and social control popularized within China and without. These two sections especially address the role that each institution played in mitigating generational conflicts and disciplining rebellious sons. After presenting the state's supportive attitude toward parental authority, the third section reverses this perspective to show how families negotiated with the state for survival. A collection of case histories erodes the image of the family as a social unit passively regulated by the state and emphasizes the agency with which individual families crafted strategies to take advantage of, if not manipulate, state resources.
A final word concerns the nature of the police reports that documented cases of filial impiety. The use of police reports is another aspect that makes this study different from much of the previous scholarship. When scholars study domestic conflicts, whether marital or generational, they mostly rely on court files and reports in mass media to support their arguments. But police reports offer a comparatively firsthand record of what happened on the scene. They were produced within the police system, at the levels of the precinct, district, and general bureau. Temporally, they extend from 1913 to 1948, which roughly covers the periods of the Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) regime, warlord rivalries, Nationalist governance, the Japanese occupation, and the civil war between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party of China.
Despite the political upheavals and regime transitions, the documentation of cases of disobedience showed no fundamental formulaic changes. A police report usually started with a one-page summary recording briefly but comprehensively what happened, who was involved, and who at the precinct processed the incident. It then included the original testimonies, along with transcribed copies, from every party involved, including the parent/plaintiff, the child/defendant, other family members, and witnesses, if any. Scholars have suggested that testimony was collected by the police officer, who asked each party involved in the case to answer the same questions in the same order, but it was recorded in the form of a first-person narrative in vernacular language. The written testimony was thus probably not completely unmediated, but the major details were credibly accurate.
13
The police reports discussed in this article attest to this observation. Except for a couple of cases recorded in dialogue form, most were written in the first-person voice,
Turning Domestic Conflict into a Social Problem: Police Intervention in Filial Impiety
The transfer of authority from the magistrate of the empire to the police of the modern state marked a major administrative change in dealing with filial impiety. While previous scholarship mainly addressed the role that the police played in mediating public and civic affairs, this article shifts to their intervention in the domestic sphere. 15 This intervention, on the one hand, was a result of a series of legal reforms that extended from the late Qing to the Republican era. Lawmakers largely reduced the penalties imposed on disobedient children, which aided the state's gradual but tenacious efforts to suppress parental authority. This left the police with considerable room and power as the first and primary responders to generational conflicts. On the other hand, the police, with their own code and practice, characteristically processed filial impiety not so much as a domestic conflict as a threat to social harmony. The conduct of the police thus restructured the relationship between state and family in the name of maintaining social order.
Filial piety had long been considered the moral and political foundation of the hierarchically structured state governance in imperial China. 16 This was evidenced by the fact that in “Zisun weifan jiaoling” (Disobedience of instructions by the descendants), a section of the legal code that can be traced back to the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC), the guilty child had always been punished much more heavily than individuals committing similar offenses against people who were not kin. 17 In the first half of the twentieth century, both the Qing and the Republican regimes took the initiative to reform the legal system as part of modern state building. 18 One of the most debated issues was how to legally define and adjudicate parent-child conflicts. Yue Du has conducted a thorough and insightful study of this issue. According to her, as the notion of filial piety was still deep-rooted in society, all of the authorities concerned tried to strike a balance between tacitly challenging the social norm and advancing legal reforms for equality based on individual rights. Thus, despite some compromises, the general tendency of legal reforms was in the direction of “encroachment on parental authority and the separation of filial piety from legal mechanisms of state building.” 19 Furthermore, as Jing Fenghua has shown, legal reformers introduced and implemented the concept of qinquan (parental rights) to emphasize both the rights and obligations of the parent with respect to the child and thus challenged the previously absolute authority of the former over the latter. 20
Changes in the adjudication of filial impiety were not advanced without opposition. The reformers, however, justified their argument by pointing to and relying on the police as a new administrative authority supplementing the jurisdiction of the courts since the late Qing. According to a memorial submitted to the throne by some high-ranking pro-reform officials in 1910, “Most disobedience cases in the past were basically caused by vagrancy and loafing. Now the Police Contravention Code that is currently in effect already has specific instructions on vagrancy and loafing. It is enough to refer to that.” 21 It was from this moment on that the police began to play a decisive role in handling parent-child conflicts.
The modern Chinese police system first appeared in 1901 as an arm of the state. 22 Seven years later, the Qing government issued the Police Contravention Code, the first of its kind in China. Within its forty-five articles, the code officially defined eight domains that the police were in charge of. They included state affairs, public endangerment, transportation, mailing and communication, social order, customs, body and sanitation, and property. 23 This code granted the police the administrative authority to intervene into almost every aspect of society with a scope and intensity unprecedentedly imagined. Later expanded to include fifty-three articles and renamed Weijing fafa (Police Contravention Punishment Law), the code's main structure and spirit extended far into the Republican era. 24 It was not until 1943 that the state undertook a major revision of the code, enlarging it to include seventy-nine articles. 25 With its high rate of activity, including mediation, arrests, rulings, and implementing short-term sentences for civil and criminal misdemeanors, the police force not only blurred, if it did not transgress, the line between administration and jurisdiction; more importantly, it gradually supplanted the elites and associations previously in charge of various civil affairs in the city and established direct and expansive control over society and its members. 26 In other words, the police fundamentally redefined the relationship between state and its various constituents—individuals, families, and social groups—in a centralized manner.
The Beijing police force germinated in 1902 and was officially established three years later. 27 It was designed to integrate duties previously undertaken by different bureaus under a unified and centralized force that would maintain order in the capital. 28 The Beijing police assumed a wide range of responsibilities and divided the capital into different districts to better cover the inner and outer areas of the city. 29 The police force expanded rapidly. According to Cai Xun, a police officer himself, the number of police patrolmen rose from 4658 in 1912 to 9044 in 1942. 30 The municipal government of Beijing struggled hard to manage the police fiscally, but the daily presence of these uniformed policemen walking around every corner of the city and detecting all sorts of violations made the state a prevailing authority on a routine basis. 31 By the 1920s, Beijing had already become one of the best-policed metropolises in the world. 32
Generational conflicts fell under the purview of the police, as evidenced by the cases discussed in this article. But there was a twist. The category of “filial impiety” was not officially listed in the police contravention code. Not only that, there was no mention of domestic conflicts at all. The previously mentioned eight domains over which the police were authorized to exert their power almost exclusively focused on individual behaviors in relation to public spaces, social affairs, or state interests. This meant that in order to intervene in domestic conflicts, the police had to reframe them as something that potentially or actually threatened the greater good or the social order so that the state could legitimately step in. This mentality is clearly illustrated by the training that police received.
A large portion of the training manuals used by police was devoted to teaching them how to approach, if not pry into, the household, and on what grounds they could do so. For example, a police textbook published in 1929 and formulated as a series of questions and answers asked, “What are the ways that the police know the evil and good of the people?” The answer read, “In the district under their control, [the police] should often investigate which family is poor and which is rich, which is good and which is bad, with whom the members of the family socialize, what the family members do, and how many people are in the family. If [the police] can know all this, they will naturally know the good and evil. If something occurs, it will be easy to proceed. This is the most important thing for the police.”
33
Meanwhile, as some scholars have rightly emphasized, the police had paid substantial, if not excessive, attention to household registration since their founding. 34 In 1926, the Beijing police established a branch specifically in charge of door-to-door registration. Its purpose was to regulate and monitor the circulation of the population, but it actually helped the police to become “very familiar with the population, occupation, and behavior of [the people in] the households in the controlled territory. This is highly beneficial to police work.” 35 In the eyes of the police, the family was not a unit of livelihood and bonding, but a knot in the web of social relations that harbored potential ruptures threatening society and state.
Given this conception of the family, the police charged unfilial sons not as saboteurs of the domestic order but as violators of social customs. Unfortunately, however, the police rarely cited specific articles of infraction in the records, and thus researchers can only occasionally specify on what grounds the charge of filial impiety was justified.
36
For example, in August 1940, a 20-sui laborer named Song Changhou got into a fight with his second brother, the 25-sui Song Hualiang.
37
According to Changhou, his father asked him to watch over Hualiang, who often stole from his family. This time, he caught Hualiang taking a blue tunic and, armed with a knife, tried to stop him. He did not know that his mother had actually permitted Hualiang to take the garment. Thus while the two brothers were fighting, the mother scolded Changhou
As the police fully prepared for their access to the domestic space, it was easy and convenient for a parent to ask for an intervention. In police reports, no matter where the conflicts occurred—at home, in the residential compound, on the street, at the temple fair, or at the railway station—and no matter when—in the early morning or at midnight—parents could always reach out to the police, or hanjing (call the police) and gaojing (report to the police) in their own words. Sometimes, policemen on patrol heard the noise of fighting and then discovered the conflict. There were even some cases in which fathers did not show up personally but sent letters to the police, accusing their sons of not following their instructions. For example, Wu Kun, aged 64 sui, was a clerk of various government bureaus and committees in Fengtian, Jiangsu, and Beijing. He even worked at the police bureau for some time. In 1936, Wu Kun sent a mail to the police, accusing his son, the 42-sui Wu Zhiping, also a government clerk and a former police officer, of various vices. They included chihe piaodu (to go feasting, wining, whoring, and gambling), a highly generic phrase often appearing in police recording the parents’ descriptions of their sons, as well as vagrancy and disobedience. The son had recently been involved in a dispute over rent, which further angered his father. Thus, Wu Kun urged the police to bring Zhiping in for punishment. To verify his identity and prove his status, the father also attached his business card at the end of the letter, as did most plaintiffs/fathers when filing a complaint by mail. The police indeed brought in the son as the father demanded. But after questioning, they concluded that there were no significant ill feelings between the two and thus released Zhiping with an admonition. 41
The Beijing police were meticulous in their attempts to note any sign of impiety. Contrary to the common perception that they were reluctant to step in during domestic conflicts, or that they were forced to get involved due to their everyday presence on the street, police actually took the initiative to intervene in generational conflicts. In 1914, the police encountered a news item entitled “Disobedience” in a newspaper named Daziyou bao (Great Freedom). It reported the case of an old woman who was being physically abused by her daughter-in-law and son. They immediately looked into the matter. 42 In another more unconventional case that occurred in 1943, a person using the name Lu Buping sent a letter to the police. This pseudonym derived from the idiom lujian buping, badao xiangzhu, which evokes a knight-errant who, observing someone being abused literally on the road or metaphorically in life, would rescue the person with his sword. The writer's pen name expressed the purpose of the letter. Lu Buping claimed that he saw an old lady about to commit suicide outside the Chaoyang Gate of Beijing. After he saved her, she told him about her abusive son and daughter-in-law. Lu Buping then asked the police chief to investigate the matter. He concluded the letter with the words, “Cultivating the people to form good customs and punishing one to admonish many others. This is truly what the living Buddha of ten thousand families does.” These generic expressions, previously used to honor the highly respectable and benevolent “father-mother officials” (fumu guan) of the imperial rule, now became the insignia of modern state bureaucrats. The police located the elderly woman's son, a 28-sui wood-shop owner, but found no sign of abuse. They even questioned his cousin, a 30-sui barber, in conjunction with the case, but failing to obtain further evidence they released the young man. 43 In both cases, despite the fact that the police were sent on a wild goose chase, their actions represent the extent to which this state force was willing and ready to intervene in generational conflicts.
From Public Humiliation to Detention and Rehabilitation: the Reformatory's Remaking of Disobedient Sons
When the police charged someone with disobedience, the defendant usually faced one of three possibilities. If the son hurt the parent seriously or if unrelated accomplices were involved, the police normally forwarded the case to the district court for the juridical trial, as the Fu Quanke case showed. Or the parent could choose to drop the charge, but often this only occurred after the defendant showed sincere remorse after being admonished by the police, as described in the Wu Zhiping case. The third option, which accounts for the largest portion of the disobedience cases collected in this article, was to send the defendant to the reformatory with a sentence ranging from one to six months. If the defendant had other problems, such as drug addiction, he was to be transferred to the dispensary attached to the reformatory or, after September 1934, to the liexing dupin jiechusuo (detoxification center for hard drugs) to get clean before serving his time at the reformatory. 44 Therefore, if the police were first responders to generational conflicts, it was the reformatory that took over the main responsibility for disciplining unruly sons.
The reformatory, as a punitive institution, revealed the radical departure of the modern state from its imperial predecessors both in style and in ideology. It not only shifted the focus of punishment from public humiliation to walled confinement and labor training; more importantly, its primary agenda was not so much to promote Confucian values such as filial piety as it was to remake unruly individuals into able-bodied citizens of the state. Parents troubled by their ungrateful sons were well aware of the benefits that the reformatory could provide and thus saw this institution as a solution to generational conflicts. The downside of this recourse to state power, however, was that its effects were highly contingent on how much the state was able or willing to invest in reformation.
Similar to the police system, the reformatory also came out of the legal reforms initiated in the late Qing. The reforms, on the one hand, modernized the Qing legal code by drawing on Western and Japanese models founded on the notions of equality and humanity, and on the other hand, they incorporated the traditional ideologies of moral education, rehabilitation, and cultivation into the system. One consequence was the replacement of corporal punishment and banishment with imprisonment, rehabilitative detention, and fines. 45 These changes carried over into the Republican era. The specific articles of the legal system were revised in major or minor ways, but in terms of methods of punishment, the state basically continued to implement, according to Jan Francis Kiely, “a system of discipline through institutional incarceration and instruction aimed at transforming the mind and character [of the criminals].” 46
What lay behind the changes in punitive techniques were the notions of reformation and productivity that circulated globally in the modern era. They restructured the relationship between individual and state as the reformers proposed to remake offenders from idle and parasitical transgressors of law and order into productive and worthy citizens. 47 This applied to Republican China as well. According to Janet Chen, the reformers saw that the combination of detention and labor would be “the most promising method of creating productive citizens.” 48 They thus proposed to detain the offenders and provide them with skills training in order to reform them. By doing so, they expected that the reformed individual, once released, would be able not only to support himself and his family, but also to responsibly contribute to social stability and state building.
It was under such circumstances that reformatories, along with many other similar workhouses and poorhouses, began to appear in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, and they continued to operate, though not without changes, in the Republican era. The reformatory of Beijing, which is central to this article, was established in 1904. 49 Under the tutelage of the police, it took in petty offenders who violated the police code and became an extension of the prison system. Sometimes it also admitted the poor, the unemployed, the vagrant, the mad, and the sick. 50 The reformatory detained these people for a certain period of time, ranging from one month to a few years, and provided them with some handicraft training. 51 According to one regulation drafted in 1915, for example, the reformatory planned to divide inmates into four groups and taught them cloth weaving, iron casting, basket making, and rope braiding. If the handmade products were sold for a price, the poor received sixty percent of the total and the petty offenders fifty percent. If the inmate worked well for the whole month, he would be praised in the monthly review and rewarded with a bonus. 52 After 1927, control of the reformatory was transferred from the police to the Social Bureau, which offered, or at least planned to offer, training in seven areas to inmates: cloth weaving, shoemaking, rope braiding, iron casting, carpentry, printing, and carpet weaving. 53
The corrective and training attributes of the reformatory were a crucial factor for reformers to consider when discussing the matter of filial impiety. In 1910, when Shen Jiaben (1840–1913), the founding figure of the late Qing legal reform, explained to his opponents why he believed that zisun weifan jiaoling should be decriminalized, he asserted that “Disobedience of parental instructions within the family is a matter of education. [The state] should establish the reformatory in order to promote the way of education. [Disobedience] is not a criminal or a civic matter and there is no need to include [the punishment for violating it] in the legal code.” 54 Even though filial impiety was not completely decriminalized as Shen had hoped, the reformatory indeed became the major institution where most unruly sons were restrained. Not only that, as Jing Fenghua has suggested, most sons under discipline were adults. 55 This made the reformatory different from its Western counterpart, which primarily admitted minors. 56
The reformatory, first and foremost, changed the ways in which filial impiety was punished. As Du has noted, previously when a parent sent an offending son to the magistrate for punishment in late imperial China, the latter was either sentenced to death, if the offense was serious; beaten with a bamboo stick, in the case of less serious offenses; or sent to a malarial place or to the frontier upon the parent's insistence. Among the three punishments, the one most frequently applied was beating, and sometimes canguing the son or placing him in a cage. Du concludes that these means were “a form of didactic show designed to discourage filial rebellion.” 57 But in the modern era, this style of public humiliation and warning was replaced by confinement and labor training behind walls. Guangxiu, the refractory son mentioned at the beginning of this article, well illustrates this change in approach over the course of his abundant experiences with the system. In 1902, before the reformatory was established, he received eighty blows with a bamboo rod as a first-time offender guilty of filial impiety. 58 In the following decades, however, he was no longer flogged but served his short-term sentences at the reformatory and the prison.
The punitive nature and labor-oriented custodial style of the reformatory redefined how the charge of filial impiety functioned in Republican China. It was not so much a public announcement of a violation of Confucian morality; rather, individual families used it as a practical strategy with which they could directly reach out to the state to secure their survival and viability in the rapidly changing urban environment. To be sure, inmates charged with disobedience only constituted a small proportion of convicts sentenced to the reformatory. Most of them had committed misdemeanors like theft, drug addiction, impersonating military men, wandering at night, or leaving a restaurant without paying for the meal, or some vaguely defined offenses such as indecent behavior or vagrancy and unemployment. 59 But from the perspective of the parent, the reformatory provided the possibility of transferring domestic crises to the state, no matter how temporary the relief was.
Some parents hoping to restore domestic harmony appreciated the confining and disciplinary attributes of the reformatory and saw it as an alternative space to place their wayward sons. The Guangxiu case was one example. In 1917, the 44-sui Guangxiu, after decades of vagrancy on the street, decided to come back home. But at this point, his family already functioned very well without him. His two brothers, both married, had decent jobs and supported their parents in obedience to filial ideals. When Guangxiu moved in, however, his mother, Mrs. Chong, asserted that not only did he constantly fight with his parents, brothers, and neighbors, he also sexually harassed his sister-in-law and his mother. 60 His parents lost patience with him quickly. Between April 1919 and September 1921, his mother lodged at least three complaints at the police precinct and demanded that Guangxiu be incarcerated as long as possible, preferably forever. In fact, Guangxiu spent about twenty-four of those twenty-nine months behind walls.
Other parents valued the handicraft training and work programs provided at the reformatory, which they believed could correct their sons’ idleness and secure their future survival in society. Take Ji Zhixin as one example. Zhixin came from an affluent family, as his father Ji Shigui worked as a Chinese language tutor at the Japanese embassy and had accumulated sufficient wealth over the years. Shigui was always proud to have educated four grateful and promising sons, not including his second son Zhixin, an educated young man struggling with a serious heroin problem. Between 1933 and 1941, Shigui lodged at least eleven complaints of filial impiety at the police station, accusing Zhixin of using heroin, idling, fighting against his brothers, disobeying his father, threatening and hurting his mother, and stealing things from the family. In 1938, Zhixin was serving his fourth sentence at the reformatory. At a certain point, father and son exchanged some letters that give us a glimpse of daily life inside the reformatory. According to Zhixin, only four types of training were offered at that time: sole-making, with each person earning eight fen for one and a half pieces of multi-layered soles; matchbox pasting, which paid eight fen for every eight thousand boxes; carpentry; and weaving, which was restricted to convicts under the age of thirteen, as they were young enough to have the dexterity required for this activity. Instruction in printing had been canceled because of financial difficulties.
Both father and son were aware of the importance of skills training. Ji Shigui urged his son to “learn a specific skill during the time at the reformatory, so that I [Zhixin] could have a way of making a living in the future.” Zhixin also expressed in his letter that “in the environments of the current society and the future … people like me without skills will probably not be able to live.” 61 Yet Zhixin, viewing himself as an educated person, clearly resisted submitting himself to practical training, at least at the beginning of his detention. He spent his days at the reformatory simply writing and reciting moral instructions. But according to his record, it seems that he was eventually assigned to the group of sole-makers. This kind of work normally fell into the category of woman's work, and Zhixin earned slightly less than a free woman did. 62 When Zhixin was released at the end of his sentence, the record indicated that his “working” was graded as good. Unfortunately, shoemaking did not reform Zhixin as expected. He continued to pass in and out of the system over the following years.
Of all the considerations behind a parent's decision to send a son to the reformatory, the financial one was probably the greatest concern. The Beijing reformatory had always struggled hard with funding shortages and overcrowding, among other problems, in its years of operation during the Republic era. 63 But it insisted on covering the board and lodging expenses of every inmate until it could not do so anymore. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Beijing was no longer the capital of China and thus lost its central status in politics; furthermore, the whole economy was declining, which in turn left more vagrants and unemployed individuals on the street. 64 In 1933, the reformatory complained to the police department—the source of most of its inmates—that the number of individuals currently held already exceeded the maximum of three hundred by sixty, and it was thus short of 180 yuan for operating costs. 65 Because of the financial burdens created by the increasing number of convicted offenders, the institution announced that after August 1 of 1935, it would charge each convict three yuan a month to cover all his expenses inside. 66
This new policy radically changed the profile of disobedience cases and the dynamics between family and state in a most direct way. Previously, the financial burden of educating, training, and disciplining ungrateful sons all fell on the shoulders of the reformatory. Parents often took advantage of this benefit, especially those from the lower classes of society. For example, in 1935, Zhou Cheng Shi was troubled by the fact that her husband, the main breadwinner, had left Beijing for his hometown, which “made the family unable to live.” To make things worse, her eldest son Zhou Liangtong, an 18-sui man unable to use his right hand, squandered the family's money and committed theft. Mrs. Zhou then decided to send Liangtong to the reformatory by accusing him of disobedience. But the police quickly recognized her true intention and declined her request on the grounds that “the reason that [Zhou Cheng Shi] sent [Zhou Liangtong] to the reformatory was that she had so many children. This was not the true purpose of reformation.” The reformatory also stated that “Zhou Liangtong was a disabled person. The reformatory did not have a program to educate the disabled. Therefore, we could not take him in.” 67 The case was dismissed, but it helps to explain why parents were willing to send, often repeatedly, their sons to the reformatory and to demand that they be detained as long as possible.
After August 1, 1935, however, the profile of filial impiety dramatically changed. This is most clearly evidenced by the fact that in the set of 199 cases discussed in this article, the number of accusations that did not culminate in detention almost tripled from fifteen to forty-one after that date. More and more parents chose to drop the charges in order to avoid paying any money. The most revealing case is that of Wang Fu, who was awkwardly caught up in the middle of this transition. In May 1935, Wang Xie Shi lodged a complaint against her adopted son Wang Fu, a casual laborer, for disobedience after he cursed her, stole items from the family, and beat his wife into unconsciousness. He was sentenced to three months in the reformatory. Yet, on July 25, his mother rushed to the police precinct and requested that her son be released on bail. Having learned from the reformatory that the new policy was about to be implemented on August 1, she told the police, “My family is too poor. Our whole life depends on my daughter-in-law selling flowers. Where can we find enough money to pay the expenses?” The police discharged Wang Fu from the reformatory on the last day of July. 68 It is interesting to see that Wang Xie Shi, and presumably other commoners in the city, was able to learn about the policy change and to make her decision accordingly. But it is also noteworthy that the police were aware of, and tacitly tolerated, parents’ appropriation of state resources for their own needs.
Although the new policy compelled many parents to drop charges, it actually made the inexcusable crime of filial disobedience more visible. As a matter of fact, in cases in which parents still insisted on filing charges after August 1, they often claimed, “I am willing to pay for the board and lodging [of my son].” This willingness indicated just how intolerable some parents found their offspring to be. One extreme case is that of Zhao De Shi, an old lady in her seventies, and her son, Zhao Hailiang, a loafer in his thirties who was addicted to heroin and often extorted money from her. Between 1936 and 1941, Mrs. Zhao lodged altogether fourteen complaints against her son for disobedience and requested his incarceration at the reformatory. The last ten filings were consecutive, which meant that her son remained at the reformatory for thirty-three months until he was freed. Whenever the date of his release approached, his mother submitted a petition, at a cost of five fen, to the police, requesting that his sentence be extended on the grounds that she was too old to discipline him. In one of her petitions, the mother claimed, in a rather desperate tone, “I work as a servant. I pay all my wages for the board and lodging [of my son at the reformatory]. They are three yuan and six jiao. If it were not that I had no other choices, I would have not repeatedly requested the incarceration.” 69 This mentality of “having no other choices” reflected the extent to which families depended on the state in their search for solutions to generational conflicts. But it could also be read as a self-serving strategy, whereby parents publicly acknowledged their subordination to the state in exchange for protection. As a matter of fact, the police accepted all of Mrs. Zhao's petitions and detained Hailiang for a considerably long period, far longer than the usual sentence for filial impiety. This leads to the question of how families negotiated with the state to resolve generational conflicts, which is discussed in the following section.
Enlisting the Aid of the State in Family Conflicts: Accusations of Filial Impiety as a Survival Strategy
With the advent of the police and the reformatory, filial impiety was no longer a matter of domestic disorder but an avenue by which many families came into contact with the state for survival. Contrary to what scholars have suggested—namely, that the modern state intended to make itself the ultimate authority over its citizens by suppressing parental power at home—the state actually showed solid support for parents when processing accusations of filial impiety.
One feature common to many cases is that the police stood firmly on the side of the accusing parent. By default, if not deliberately, they prioritized parental authority over facts and ruled in favor of the parent even when they were aware that the son had been falsely accused or wronged. The case of Wu Zhensheng provides a clear picture of the police's position. Between 1916 and 1926, Wu Tinggui, a small businessman, lodged several complaints against his son Wu Zhensheng for various unfilial violations, including theft, extortion, and threatening his parents with a knife. 70 The police dutifully investigated the matter by interviewing relatives, neighbors, the father's apprentice, and the future father-in-law of the son. The circumstances in the case turned out to be a boy's version of the Cinderella story. Wu Zhensheng, the eldest son of the family, was born to Wu Tinggui's first wife, Ma Shi, who passed away when Zhensheng was four. Wu Tinggui not only usurped Ma Shi's house, which had been her dowry, and lived there with his second wife and the four children they produced, but he also forced Zhensheng to constantly borrow money from his maternal grandmother. Whenever the grandmother refused to lend money, Wu Tinggui sued Zhensheng for disobedience. The father even falsely accused the son of stealing money from him. After fully investigating all the facts, the police nevertheless took the father's side in every filing and detained the son. In February 1917, the police precinct proposed a rather strict ruling, which was “to send [Wu Zhensheng] to the reformatory and let him learn a craft forever. [Wu Zhensheng] should not be bailed out.” 71 In reality, this recommendation was not fully carried out, as the father bailed Zhensheng out after six months. 72 But what is intriguing about this case is that in a period when the denunciation of filial piety and patriarchy was at its peak in intellectual circles and in mass media, the police knowingly tolerated the father's unjust or false accusations and punished the son again and again. To some extent, the modern police echoed, or inherited, the state ideology of the imperial era, in which, according to Yue Du, “the state's tolerance of ‘falsity’ served its goal of upholding the greater ‘truth’ of the parent-child hierarchy.” 73
Of course one can argue that the Wu Zhensheng case was too extreme to be representative. But we can see how the systematic favoring of the parent over the son operated in the bail process. Many families whose son had been detained at the reformatory chose to bail him out before the release date. In a few cases, the bailsmen were neighbors, colleagues, or friends of the family. This indicates the formation of new social relations centered on living space, occupation, and personal connections cultivated in the city. 74 But in the majority of disobedience cases, the bailsmen were either relatives of the parents or the parents themselves.
The high frequency with which relatives participated in the bail process challenges the conclusion that families in the city increasingly became atomized and gradually lost their connections to their extended families. 75 According to police reports, in addition to providing bail, relatives also played an active role in helping the family settle down in the city, finding jobs for family members, assisting in various ritual matters from life to death, and mediating domestic conflicts. Kin relations were probably no longer structured in the same way as the lineage or clan in villages. 76 But the bonds of kin that threaded through the Republican city crucially secured the chance of survival of individual families.
When relatives tried to bail out the defendants, however, the police usually rejected their requests and demanded that the parents come in person to post bail, or that relatives present the written permission from the parents. This was almost identical to what happened in the late imperial era, when the magistrate only released the disobedient son after gaining the parent's in-person consent or personal testimonies forwarded by the relatives. 77 For example, in February 1927, the 29-sui farmer Cui Min’an served a five-month sentence at the reformatory as a result of his morphine addiction, combined with charges of squandering funds, and of attacking his father, Cui Guozhong. Min’an's maternal grandfather, the 67-sui Chen Baocai, came to bail him out on the grounds that he was “the closest kinsman of the Cui family and cannot stand by and watch.” Chen claimed that he had reached an agreement with Min’an's father regarding bail. But the police refused his request and insisted that the father present himself in person. 78 Similarly in August 1927, Liu Wenyi, a 33-sui opium addict and a loafer, was sentenced to two months at the reformatory for not following the instructions of his mother, Liu Ma Shi. After one month, Liu Qi's paternal aunt came to the police, stating that she had already acquired the permission from Liu Qi's mother to bail him out. This time the aunt failed. The mother specifically sent her eldest son, Liu Zhen, to the police precinct to represent her, as she was too sick to come in person. Zhen claimed that the mother did not want to see Liu Qi released. Eventually the police refused the paternal aunt's request and held Liu Qi until he served his full sentence. 79 By placing parental consent at the center, the police, first and foremost, made it crystal clear to the public that they highly valued parental authority. But at the same time, this stance actually gave the family leverage to negotiate with the state for what it needed, as seen from the strategies discussed below which were adopted by many families.
Scholars have suggested that families in the imperial era preferred self-policing to seeking state intervention, unless major crises occurred. 80 But families in the Republican era went to the police very frequently and fought over some very trivial domestic matters. A few chunks of coal, a pair of shoes, or an alcohol-induced fight—matters that would not be worth mentioning under normal circumstances—now often led to the filing of charges of filial impiety at the police station. Parents also used phrases like “in a sudden moment of fury,” “trivial matters,” or “bickering” to indicate the unexpected and insignificant nature of the conflicts. Just as Yamin Xu has suggested, “for ordinary Republican citizens, litigation indeed had become part of their daily experience.” 81
The constant eruption of conflicts within the family was largely due to the increasingly complicated urban environment. Republican Beijing, like many other big cities in China then, was deeply troubled by political chaos, an unstable economy, social disorder, and war. Every family and its members living in the city, therefore, struggled hard with such problems as the rising population density, increasingly cramped living quarters, unemployment, and pauperization. 82 For example, according to a social survey conducted by Sydney D. Gamble, the leading sociologist of Republican Beijing, regarding how Chinese people lived their lives in late 1920s, 124 out of the 283 families surveyed in the city were crammed into one room. 83 It is thus not hard to imagine why conflicts occurred so easily and frequently.
These problems deeply affected all families living in the city. Domestically speaking, they expedited the restructuring of the family in terms of its members, properties, and relationships and possibly increased the frequency of generational conflicts. Take Zhang Rong's case as one example. His mother Zhang Jin Shi and wife Zhang Guo Shi both worked as domestic servants and became the main breadwinners of the family. But the downside of this family economy was that these two women usually lived at their masters’ places. This left Zhang Rong with no “home” to go to. According to his testimony, he “temporarily lodged” at a small teahouse and worked as both a cook and a rickshaw puller. He was also frustrated because he had not been able to see his wife for sixteen months. He thus suspected that his mother had sold his wife and came to confront his mother. But when his mother brought his wife to see him, Zhang Rong struck his wife and seized a piece of clothing and a silver hair clasp from her. His mother could not stop him and had to file a complaint of filial impiety at the police precinct. 84 Women working as domestic servants to support their family and wife-selling were not uncommon tactics adopted by families to survive in Republican Beijing. 85 But in the case of Zhang Rong, the combination of the two led to a clash that largely challenged the stereotype of the abusive mother-in-law. Rather, it was she who protected her daughter-in-law from her ruthless son by taking him to the police. As a matter of fact, in at least seven other cases, a parent acted to protect a daughter-in-law in a conjugal conflict and saved the woman from an abusive son by filing charges of disobedience.
Socially speaking, cases of filial impiety show that young men, rather than women or the elderly, were more likely to incur such “urban ills,” to borrow Madeleine Yue Dong's words, as drug addiction, gambling, prostituting, theft, and vagrancy, as they had more access to education, work, and entertainment. 86 This also made generational conflicts unavoidably intense. Drug addiction best illustrates this point. Many scholars have seen it as a serious social problem in modern China and have thus mainly focused on the ways in which different political regimes and social organizations addressed and corrected this problem. 87 But it was also the most frequently cited reasons for parent-child conflicts at home, as altogether there were 28 out of 199 cases that fell into this category. According to some testimonies, young men became addicted when they worked, studied at school, associated with the wrong friends and neighbors, or simply sought relief from the pain caused by certain illnesses. But it was the family that was the first line of defense for detecting, containing, and correcting this social problem. Family members often became primary victims of the addict. Mothers were especially vulnerable, as their lives were more often than not centered on the domestic space. For example, in the case of Ji Zhixin, his father Ji Shigui complained to the police in 1939, “I went out to work every day and did not return home until night. [Zhixin's] brothers either worked or went to school. [Zhixin] extorted his long bedridden mother for money. If she did not give him money, he would grab things and sell them for drugs.” 88 Many families were similar to the Ji family: mothers often directly confronted their addicted sons when they came back home during the day to search for things to steal and were thus threatened, or worse, injured. Parents tried hard to save an addicted son by cutting off his pocket money, restraining him at home, dragging him out of drug dens, sending him away for new work, or giving him his inheritance early in the hope (which often turned out to be futile) that he would live his own life. Asking the state to correct the problem was not essentially different from any of the other means that parents believed might somehow work.
Putting all these factors together, it is not hard to understand why parents became less tolerant of their unruly sons and went to the police so frequently. As a matter of fact, parent-child conflicts were not the only circumstances that motivated households to seek help from the state, as families troubled by poverty or by mentally ill members were more than willing to embrace its interventions. 89 This relationship between family and state shows, on the one hand, that the state, with its goal of modernizing governance, no longer saw the problems of poverty, madness, or filial impiety as faults and misfortunes of individuals but as social threats needing to be corrected by the authorities. On the other hand, the state's activity also indicates that the family became a site for the containment of social problems brought about by transformations in the city. What the state promised and provided, including accessible and affordable facilities, programs to eliminate vice, and an unofficial policy of favoring parents over children, would indeed ease some disciplinary, financial, and moral crises for many families. Thus parents saw the state as a place to go for help, just as they relied on informal networks of relatives, neighbors, colleagues, and friends for support. But this does not mean that the family subjugated itself to the state authority completely. On the contrary, many families showed great agency and flexibility in negotiating with the state in the service of their own ends and needs, as seen in the pathetic, self-constructed image of the parent who filed a complaint.
In police reports of filial disobedience, many parents cast themselves as the helpless victims of their abusive sons, waiting to be rescued by the state. This was especially clear in two categories of parent, elderly people and mothers. Regarding the first category, the police reports reveal a tendency for older parents to make themselves sound more pathetic and to request a longer sentence for the unruly son. Parents between their thirties and fifties often chose to lodge a complaint and then drop it after the police admonished the son, nor did they request specific sentences. But as parents grew older and entered, for example, their sixties or seventies, the unfilial son was often in his prime age and thus posed a greater threat to the whole family. An aging and fragile parent confronted by a strong but ruthless son was more likely to explicitly request a longer sentence or even permanent incarceration.
With respect to the second category, mothers (110) were more likely than fathers (86) to file charges against an unruly son. 90 Even when the father was present and capable, it was still more often the mother who went to the police. Ocko has presented a similar argument that mothers were more likely to initiate lawsuits in the imperial period. But in most of the cases cited by Ocko, the mothers were in fact stepmothers or adoptive mothers. 91 Most cases of disobedience reported in Republican Beijing involved biological mothers. This is in line with the widely accepted notion and practice that mothers usually took care of domestic management, including the discipline of children. 92 It is also plausible that mothers, who were more closely associated with the domestic space in daily life, thus had more chances to confront their vagrant and ill-behaved sons, as previously discussed. Regardless, when a mother went to the police, she often presented herself as a vulnerable woman and thus appealed to the sympathy and protection of the state authorities, who deemed themselves to be paternal figures.
Chong Peng Shi, who had been mentioned several times in previous sections, was a perfect example of a parent who represented both of these categories: an elderly mother. In filings made in the Republican era, it was always she who went back and forth between the local police precinct, the general police bureau, and the court to persistently lodge complaints. In 1923, Mrs. Chong was already 72 sui. She explained why she insisted on seeking the help of the state: “My son Guangxiu disobeys his mother. He is like an animal. If your respected bureau releases him, I cannot imagine what my life will be.” She then implored the police to punish Guangxiu heavily and not to release him. 93 Seven years later, in 1930, Mrs. Peng showed up at the police precinct again. Looking exhausted and hopeless, the mother lamented almost tearfully that “I am 79 sui now. My life is like a candle in the wind. I am close to death. I am incapable of disciplining [my son]…. [My son] is the sin of my previous life. [When I write this petition], every word is my tear and every sentence hurts me. In order to preserve my remaining life, I bow to request that your respected bureau arrest [him] and place him under strict control to punish his disobedience.” 94 The police procedurally responded to every one of the filings that the mother made. But it is also clear that they gradually lost patience with this persistent woman. The police reports became thinner and more superficial day by day. Eventually this family completely disappeared from the archive.
In addition to the strategy of self-pity, a parent could also manipulate the system by presenting a narrative filled with inconsistencies. The parent, on the one hand, justified the initial complaint by articulating the vagrancy of the son, yet on the other hand, when wanting to bail the son out, described him as the sole breadwinner, without whom the family could not survive. Take the case of Lian San as an example. Lian Chen Shi brought Lian San, her second son, to the police precinct for filial impiety in 1926. According to her, San squandered his share of the household division and was thus unable to support his wife and three children. 95 Out of mercy, Lian Chen Shi took in San's whole family and let him take charge of her paper-making shop. But her son failed her again. Not only did he keep all the profits to himself, he also constantly initiated fights with his two brothers. In Lian Chen Shi's statement, San's failure to support his own family was a strong piece of evidence proving his irresponsibility. Her complaint sent San to the reformatory for two months. But after just one month, Lian Chen Shi came back to the police to post bail. She declared that without San, her family did not have enough to eat and could not make a living. The mother herself, even though she owned a paper-making shop and had two other good sons to support her, claimed that she had been reduced to begging to feed her family. She thus requested San's release, so that the whole family would be taken care of. The police conveniently forgot the mother's original accusation and released Lian San immediately. 96
Such narrative revisions were not limited to the bail process. Some parents might reverse their statement after making a complaint as a way to allow the police to put disciplinary pressure on a wayward son. In April 1936, the 52-sui Chun Weng Shi brought her son Tiequan to the police. She complained that “Tiequan had always been idle. Every day he just rode a bicycle on the street for fun. He depended on me and my daughters to work and support the family. He often quarreled with me and my daughters over trivial matters when he got drunk.” But after the police admonished Tiequan and he sincerely apologized, his mother agreed to drop the charge, stating that “I sued [my son] out of a sudden anger.… I have two daughters. We four all depend on my son to earn money and make a living. Now as he repents and begs me, I decide to drop the case.” 97 Chun Wen Shi was probably unwilling to pay the expenses at the reformatory if Tiequan were to be sentenced. But it is also possible that she used the mere act of filing the complaint as a way to put pressure on her son. 98 The police once again showed no reluctance to accept the self-contradictory accounts offered by the mother and released Tiequan. They quietly collaborated with the parent in her stratagem to achieve discipline.
Conclusion
Filial impiety has long been an issue in Chinese society. But who should handle it, and how? Answers to these questions varied over time. This study shows that family and state in Republican China worked together to mitigate generational conflicts at home. By detaining unruly sons at state institutions for reformation, parents transferred domestic crises to the state, and the state was able to penetrate into and control society at the basic level of the family unit. Instead of competing against each other over the control of youths, therefore, parents and the state mutually reinforced their patriarchal authority.
On the family side, parents no longer fit the stereotypical image of faceless and ruthless patriarchs, which was widely criticized in intellectual circles during the Republican era. Instead they presented themselves as the heads of the family, mobilizing all available resources in order to survive in the city. This article has analyzed the ways in which individual families took advantage of the disciplinary power of the police and the practical benefits of the reformatory. But it is also worth emphasizing that charging an unruly son with disobedience should not be seen as a last resort with no other options available. In the eyes of parents, seeking state intervention was no different from seeking support among relatives, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. The formal and informal resources were not mutually exclusive but rather mediating mechanisms that operated in parallel. Individual families navigated with great flexibility a web of all the resources available to them in order to achieve what they wanted or needed. To them, the distinction between private and public was probably never a factor to consider in practice.
From the perspective of the state, cases of filial impiety only accounted for a tiny part of the total number of cases that the police handled, but they took them very seriously because they saw generational conflicts as a potential threat to social order and state building. Disciplining unfilial sons gave them an opportunity to infiltrate the household and detect any troubled individuals in need of reformation. This process revealed tensions between ideology and practice and between different systems within the state. While the reformed legal system in the Republican era tended to suppress parental authority, police at the street level nevertheless supported the allegations of parents and ruled in favor of them. In this way, the state in turn stabilized individual families with parents at the center, and preserved the core of the society it governed. The dynamics between state and family over the redress of filial impiety thus present a complicated image of Republican China, both in its gains and pains.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Professor Ann B. Waltner of the University of Minnesota and Xiangyu Hu of Renmin's University of China provided insightful comments and unwavering support when I was writing this article. I also truly appreciate the thoughtful and critical suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Family History.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, (grant number SM202010028007).
