Los valores confucianos, la familia y  las infancias en China. Reinterpretando la tradición en el siglo XXI

Michelle Calderón García

doi:10.35305/cl.vi24.161

Authors

Michelle Calderón García Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35305/cl.vi24.161

Keywords:

Chinese Childhood, Confucianism, Filial piety, Decolonial epistemology, Moral Education

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary role of Confucian values in shaping childhoods in China, offering a critique of the universalist paradigm of childhood promoted by the Global North. Through a decolonial lens and the analysis of classical sources, contemporary studies, and recent educational policies, it argues that Confucian thought continues to function as a normative framework in moral formation, family relations, and state ideological legitimacy.

In this tradition, childhood is not seen as a progressive path to autonomy, but rather as a key stage for internalizing filial duty, ritual, and hierarchy. This relational ontology clashes with liberal-individualist frameworks that define the child as an autonomous rights-bearing subject, generating tensions across educational, legal, and familial practices. Such frictions are particularly intense in urban, globalized settings, but also affect rural and migrant children in unequal ways.

The article also identifies cultural resignifications of Confucianism within family and community settings, which operate as forms of resistance to global homogenization. It concludes by proposing a decolonial epistemology of childhood that highlights relational and plural alternatives to Western models. The Chinese case offers conceptual tools to rethink childhood from culturally embedded and historically rooted frameworks.

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