Filial piety by decree

On December 28, Ohio University student Aubrey Ireland obtained a restraining order requiring her overbearing parents to stay at least 150 meters away from her. On the same day, China passed a law requiring adult children visit their aged parents "often," or risk repercussions.

"Listen, if you don't come home to visit us, we will sue you," that was the first text message 25-year-old Aimee Yu got when she returned from her New Year holiday in Macao. It was the first holiday that she had ever not spent with her parents.

"My first reaction was 'What? I need to hire a lawyer,'" Yu told the Global Times. Like many only children, she was required by her parents to call or text them every day, and spend all her holidays either at their home in Shandong Province or welcoming them to Beijing.

This New Year, she decided to go to Macao instead. She believed her parents could wait as the Chinese New Year was the following month.

The message she got showed how wrong she was. She sees going home as a "sweet burden" but believes "my parents would never really sue me." The prayers of millions of Chinese kids may be with her.

Odd legal move

The amendment to the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly is seen as being in response to the increasing difficulty China is facing in caring for its aging population, yet it does not specify how often such visits should happen or the possible punishments.

By the end of 2010, there were over 167 million people aged over 60, 13.26 percent of the total population. This number is set to reach over 200 million this year. Many young people have left home to find jobs in the bigger cities with almost 50 percent of families now "empty nesters," according to official statistics.

However, critics say visiting parents is not an area the law should be concerned with.

"The amendment doesn't have any practical value in real life," Zhao Liangbo, deputy chief lawyer of the JoinWay Law Firm litigation department, told the Global Times, "Visiting home cannot and should not be required by law. Law enforcement would only make the situation worse."

Many Chinese parents might find it hard to sue their adult children, but loneliness is spreading like a disease among elderly parents. When his son, who lives in the same building, didn't come to visit him, the 83-year-old Wang Shiqiang from Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, went to court and sued his adult children for support payments in 2011.

"Only my eldest daughter comes to see me once in a while. My three other children have never visited me in the past 10 years, even the son who lives in the same building as me never comes," Wang told the Global Times.

In a country where the Confucian virtue of respecting the elderly is highly praised, adult children are said to have a duty to support their parents financially and emotionally.

Wang has been living alone since his wife died in 1995. He said his monthly 1,000 yuan ($161) pension is not enough to hire a carer. Legal service officials contacted his adult children, but they still refused to visit him, saying he was too difficult to be around.

"I know I might not have treated them well when they were little, but I can change now. I only hope they can come and see me more often," he said.