ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at recent transformations and continuities in the moral discourses and practices that have long served as a foundation for rural Chinese families, especially the idea of moral debt within the family. It attempts to show that despite undeniably momentous transformations in rural families throughout the collective and into the reform era, ideas of moral debt and obligation still play a pivotal role within them. Such ideas view family obligations as extending beyond the immediate family to ancestors and descendants and including not only material obligations to kin but also the simple obligation to remember them.