Old people now have their honor
The court ordered the Chinese woman to visit her elderly mother
The 77-year-old mother herself filed a lawsuit against her daughter, and the court ordered the daughter and her husband to visit the mother and mother-in-law living 40 kilometers away, at least once every two months, as well as on all holidays.
In addition, according to the Chinese state Judicial Bulletin, the Wuxi court ordered the couple to support the mother and mother-in-law financially.
On Monday, a new law came into force in China, according to which adult children are now required to visit their parents. Violators will be fined and even imprisoned.
The new law – more precisely, amendments to the law – also indicate that adults are obliged to take care of the "spiritual needs" of their parents and "never neglect the elderly."
What is "often"?Many in China doubted that the new law would work, since it does not specify how often children need to visit their parents.
The law says: "Those who live far from their parents should visit them often."
"Visit my parents often? What does the word "often" mean? Who will be involved in the enforcement of the law?", asks a user of the Chinese microblogging network Weibo.
"We all know that we need to take care of elderly parents, but sometimes we are too busy earning a living. It's normal when you don't get paid to visit your parents, but who will let us go from work for this?", another user is perplexed.
The Chinese character "xiaoshun" expresses the traditional idea of filial piety –
respect, reverence, care for parents, as well as compliance of children with the requirements of parents.
Photo: Thomas Chu / The Great Epoch – VM
One of the authors of the bill, Xiao Jinming, a professor of law at Shandong University, says that he and his colleagues first of all wanted to draw public attention to the problem of relations between adult children and elderly parents.
"The main thing is that the law reminds of the right of elderly people to request moral support. We wanted to emphasize that they need this support," Professor Xiao told the Associated Press.
However, this does not mean that the law will not have real force.
There are more and more old peopleZhang Yanfeng, a lawyer at Beijing King & Capital Law Firm, says that the law has "educational purposes," but, in his opinion, it should also become the legal basis for litigation.
"It will be difficult to implement this law in practice, but it is possible," the lawyer said before the law came into force – and the court in Wuxi confirmed his assumption.
The problem of aging parents is becoming more urgent in China. Stories about old people abandoned to their fate regularly appear in the Chinese media. Many were shocked by the story of a 91-year-old woman who was beaten and put out of her house in Jiangsu Province in the south of the country after she asked her daughter-in-law for a plate of rice porridge.
Two days later, a description of a similar story that happened in the same province appeared on Internet forums. There, in a family of farmers, a 100-year-old woman was forced to live in a pigsty.
Now there are about 185 million people over 60 in China, and by 2053, according to demographers, their number will grow to 487 million and they will make up 35% of the country's population. China's population is "aging" due to the rapid growth in average life expectancy – from 41 to 73 years over the past half century, as well as due to the "one-child policy".
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru03.07.2013