As the Chinese Party-state ramps up the revivification of chuantong wenhua , or traditional culture, really Β« Confucianism Β» as an ethical formation, I consider several structuring forms across temporalities Model Person, filiality, and above all hosting through a TV talk show called All Fathers and Mothers Under Heaven.
In classic ancestral ritual, it is always the Son who Β« hosts Β», standing as the zhuren in the center, even as the ideology of imperial patriarchy holds the Father as dominant. Hence the dilemma of the government : empowering its citizenry just enough, while not giving away too much of its own clout.
The aspect of this revival that I work on concerns filiality xiao, xiaodao, xiaoshun 1. Yet, along with such undoubted utility, these forays are taken as matters of great moral seriousness by the actors involved, thought to provide a basis of meaning and plausibility for the possibility of political action at all by connecting it to practices of perfect personhood 2.
One must ask then : How seriously do we take historically older forms when we want to understand contemporary China? In other words, forms Β« form Β» an infrastructure for social life by providing a socially legible repertoire for action in the world. Taking Β« form Β» as materialist treats the human world as an intersubjective, embodied project, available to actors through the affordances of shared semiosis, not only of language, but also of gesture, and of entire lived habitus that are also subject to non-human contingencies 3.
From the near Maoist, socialist past we find the theorization and use of Β« Exemplars Β» and Β« Models Β» for moral tutorial : Model Soldiers, Model Workers now replaced by models from education and the family.
