A hit TV series in China skewers cranky old parents

Defying the cult of filial piety thrills viewers

Print edition | China

Mar 21st 2019 | BEIJING

It is no mean feat to be one of the top-ten trending hashtags on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, for 20 consecutive days and counting. “All is Well”, a show on provincial television which premiered on March 1st, has done just that. The show tells the story of a fictional Chinese family torn by internal conflict. The female protagonist, Su Mingyu, is barely on speaking terms with her widowed father and one of her two brothers. The father is a nagging crank who expects his two adult sons to bankroll his lavish tastes. This leads to constant bickering between the brothers, neither of whom wants to be called unfilial.

Episodes of “All is Well” have been streamed more than 390m times. That exceeds the online viewership of the next most popular television series by 278m. From “The Simpsons” to “Game of Thrones”, dramas about bickering families are common in many countries. But in China, the Communist Party prefers entertainment to be unchallenging. So the questioning of blind attachment to traditional values in “All is Well” is causing a stir. Viewers are transfixed by its rare portrayal of middle-class life, warts and all.

Many Chinese can relate to the Su family’s troubles. The daughter holds a grudge against her father (the two are pictured), and especially against her late mother, for having mistreated her while pampering her brothers. As a child she was made to wash her brothers’ clothes. Her parents turned a blind eye when one of her brothers beat her. For many female viewers born before 1979, when China introduced a one-child-per-couple policy (changed to two in 2016), such scenes have brought back painful memories. Some have used social media to share their own tales of sexism within the family.

But the biggest reaction has been to the drama’s critique of filial piety. Even today, the Confucian principle of unswerving loyalty to one’s parents remains hallowed. Many people say the best measure of adherence to this virtue is whether a son takes good care of his parents in old age. A recent poll by Toutiao, a Chinese news app, found that 54% of elderly people in China get more than half of their expenses covered by their adult children. Partly, no doubt, this is due to a patchy pensions system. But it also reflects a culture of “never saying no to your parents”, says an “All is Well” fan in Beijing.

In the series, however, the widowed father does not attract much sympathy. He throws tantrums and insists that his eldest son buy him a three-bedroom apartment (the son grudgingly does so). Commentators on social media have taken to calling the father a juying (“giant baby”)—a characteristic common among parents in real life, they say. The Su children do their duty, but the audience is supposed to applaud the resentment they express.

There have been mixed reviews in state media. One newspaper said that the “realistic plot and acting” had touched the “pain points” of many viewers. Beijing Daily, however, said the drama was “unrealistic”. It said it caricatured elderly parents by “unreasonably” ascribing “every possible bad quality” of old people to one character. Someone representing every virtue admired by the party would be just fine for television, presumably.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Conflicted Confucians"