Even political leaders, who have the explicit mandate of caring for the
people (strangers), cannot forsake obligations to family members, particu-
larly those owed to elderly parents:
Tao Ying asked, ‘‘When Shun was Emperor [Sage-King] and Kao Yao was the judge,
and if the Blind Man [Emperor Shun’s father] killed a man, what was to be done?’’
Mencius said, ‘‘The only thing to do was to apprehend him.’’
‘‘Wouldn’t Shun try to prevent this?’’
‘‘How could Shun prevent this? Kao Yao had the authority for what he did.’’
‘‘Then what would Shun have done?’’
‘‘Shun looked upon casting aside the Empire as no more than discarding a worn shoe.
He would have secretly carried the old man on his back andXed to the edge of the Sea
and lived there happily, completely forgetting about the Empire.’’ (Mencius 1984 , 7 A. 35 )
This sort of view underpinned the law in Imperial China that punished
bureaucrats if they failed to retire from public service for at least two years to
mourn the death of a parent (Baker 1979 , 102 ). Mencius, however, does not
simply mean to aYrm the supreme importance ofWlial piety for rulers. In fact,
it may be somewhat misleading to use the language of some obligations
‘‘trumping’’ others. Mencius invokes stories of this sort to illustrate the need
for context-sensitive ways of dealing with plural values in conflict (Wong
2004 b), similar to the feminist care-ethics emphasis on contextual thinking.
More concretely, the point of Shun’s story may be that public officials should
resign from their posts if family members committed serious crimes (for one
thing, they would have lost much of their moral authorty, and governing would
be more difficult). The ruler need not, and should not, completely forsake
family obligations or grant some sort of ‘‘lexical priority’’ to public ones.
IV. Politics for the family. One of the features of contemporary East Asian
societies such as Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong is that they have modernized
while maintaining stable family structures relative to most Western societies.
Partly, this may be due to a shared Confucian heritage that places more
emphasis upon nourishing relationships within the family and less on the
individual pursuit of happiness and the assertion of interests that conXict
with those of loved ones. Pro-family public policies, however, may also have
played a role. Historically, these policies have served to buttress patriarchal
rule but more recent policies need not be antithetical to women’s interests.
Recent reforms of marriage law in China, for example, negotiate between
conXicting commitments to gender equality and respect for plural ways of
life as well as showing Confucian concern for families and a willingness to
use the state to support them (Wong 2004 b). Lusina Ho has argued that
confucianism and anglo-american political theory 275