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Q: Will the strong links with family and filial piety dissapear soon in China？
More Chinese people are heading out abroad to study/settle down, chase their dreams, and are being presented with more and more opportunities. However the responsibility of looking after your family, bouncing back to your hometown etc seems to be restricting these social movers. I understand it's something that's engraved in Chinese culture, but surely it's socially and economically regressive for China as a whole for all these young go getters who eventually have to come home and be a good husband/wife/parent? It must feel like an incredible weight on their shoulders.
They just take the family with them.
Many migrant workers who do save enough cash buy a apartment in the city where they work mummy and daddy lick their lips to move away from the village they live in.
I don't see how it will be able to survive in its present form for the next twenty years. Thanks to the one Child policy, the Chinese population is aging rapidly, and in a few years they are going to have a problem very much like the one that Japan is just now climbing out of, or that the US is in the middle of with its baby boomers, only much, much worse. Think about what the finances for a Chinese family where the primary earners are born after 1980. These people are going to be stuck supporting as many as four sets of grand parents, two sets of parents, themselves, and one or possibly two children, and the odd aunt or uncle. Even as the economy keeps growing per capita income is going to be in a free fall. These people are going to demand that the government play a role in supporting the elderly. The government for its part is likely to give the public what it wants, but its going to eat through its cash reserves, which per capita aren't that impressive, to do it even as it does its best to keep down costs so that it still has some money left over to invest in development without risking exceedingly high rates of inflation. That means that China is likely to set up a lot of, probably substandard, housing for the elderly. The older generation is going to be angry at the younger, to whom they gave everything for the better part of 3 decades, for abandoning them while the younger generation is going to blame the older for the strain they've placed on their finances. Both will experience the first retrenchment in standard of living that China has felt in nearly half a century. And this problem is the one that's going to eat away at familial bonds.
Scandinavian:
good points
I think the family bonds, historically, in China are financial more than anything else, this being eaten away is hardly a great loss.
The more money people have in their pockets, the less they have to rely on their kids to take care of them. If China's economy takes them fully into a first world status instead the sometimes first, mostly second and in some places third world status it's in at the moment, those familial bonds will no doubt loosen a great great deal.
It's hard to say really. I mean I have Chinese friends here whose parents (and themselves) are financially comfortable and have their own houses and to some degree quite a bit of independence. Still, I remember my friend telling me that coming back and looking after his father was something he felt he had to do and that he felt he had to repay his father's hard work bringing him up as a child.
