A Constitutional Agenda: The Imagining of the Nation as the Ultimate Parent in Late Qing and Republican China

Paternalism features largely in various regions of the world for political legitimation and indoctrination. Nonetheless, the mechanisms through which paternalism works vary across time and space, in both discourse and governing mechanisms. Such differences enable scholars to discuss the variation of political systems as well as political transformations in specific countries via studying how paternalism operates in different historical contexts.

In China’s empire-to-nation transformation, the core political relationship changed from the ruler-subject relation to the state-citizen relation during the course of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. In late imperial China, the emperor “ruled all under Heaven through the principle of filial piety,” “nurtured” and “educated” imperial subjects, described as “infant children,” as part of the fulfillment of his parental duty delegated from Heaven the Ultimate Father. The empire itself was woven into this political imagining only through the emperor, whose relationship with his subjects was naturalized mainly through, instead of against, the authority of parents and lineages. The nation-state that twentieth-century reformers and revolutionaries aspired to build in China, however, did not derive its legitimacy from the parent-child bond that had once been conceptualized as natural and unconditional. Rather, statism demanded “citizens being directly connected to the state;” the state, now self-legitimating, presented itself as the ultimate parent that made the best decisions for and called for sacrifice from its “children.” While highlighting the metaphorical importance of the family in state legitimation, the empire-to-nation transformation in China deprived the family of its constitutional significance in political institutions and social governance. This constitutional change in turn pushed the family to the margin of political imagining and mobilization, leading to the restructuring of the family in law, in cultural discourse, and eventually in social practice.