Child and Youth Well-Being in China by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Children's Studies, Minority Studies, Discrimination, Developing & Emerging Countries, Social Science, Political Science, World, Asian
ISBN: 9780429627736
Google: -ad8DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42069300
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T07:02:06+00:00

Deference to authority

In studies of political values, deference to authority (in family, workplace, and in politics) is a reliable and important measure of political culture (Dalton and Welzel 2014). In comparative terms, higher deference to authority is characteristic of a more “traditional” society that prioritizes social order over individual autonomy.

In Lucian Pye’s (1992) incisive probe into Chinese political culture, familial hierarchy in the Chinese society was the psychological foundation for people’s acquiescence toward and consent to despotic authority. Since Chinese society has gone through enormous economic changes in the direction of the market, we expect to find significant value changes among different cohort groups. More specifically, we expect the younger cohorts, who have grown up in materially far more prosperous times, to be more individualistic than the older cohorts (and generations). Various media reports suggest that the younger cohorts, empowered by freer access to information and social connections, seek greater freedom in their private life (Yang 2018).

In the CFPS survey, there are two questions probing the respondents’ conformity to authority and both relate to authority in families. Since the Chinese phrase for state or country, guojia 国家, is in fact a combination of guo (country) and jia (family), it is not a stretch to suggest that our findings about authority relations within the family can also be used to illuminate attitudes toward the country/state.

The two CFPS questions ask whether children should “give up their own will and submit to their parents’ wish,” and whether one of the respondent’s main goals in life is “to make parents proud.” Overall, youth in the CFPS survey differed markedly in their answers to the two questions. As shown in Figure 8.1, while 76.3 percent of the post-90s cohort agreed that one of their main goals in life was to make their parents proud, less than 30 percent of them answered that they should give up their own will to realize their parents’ wishes.

How should we interpret this set of answers? We submit that the remarkable difference between the answers to the two questions may suggest the younger Chinese generation’s sharply reduced deference to parental authority. While they wanted to make parents “proud,” they were, contrary to traditional Confucian precepts of hierarchical parent-child relationships, far less willing to satisfy their parents by sacrificing their own will. When analyzed separately, rural and urban youth in the 1990s cohort were agreed on the question of making parents proud. On the question of sacrificing one’s own will, however, the urban respondents were even less willing than the rural respondents.

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