China Social Science Review

No.3, 2024

 

Re-Understanding the “Home” in Chinese Civilization

(Abstract)

 

Chen Bisheng

 

In recent years, the academic community has begun to re-understand the “home” in Chinese civilization. This is because the family-state structure, human relations, and family morality were comprehensively disintegrated and reorganized in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China with the modern transformation of China. A hundred years later, the most basic elements of the “family” in the Chinese civilization tradition, that is, the family model based on father and son, husband and wife, and the family morality based on filial piety, are still dominant in modern China. There are two main ways of thinking in contemporary academic research on the issue of “family” and “filial piety”: one is to discuss “family philosophy” from the perspective of modern philosophy; The second is to start from the traditional classics to understand the changes in the ancient and modern relationships between Chinese ethics and family relations. The convergence of these different approaches has become the trend of contemporary scholarship to re-find “home.”