In the square of a residential community in northern China, dozens of women took basins of hot water to perform an act intended to show honour and humility: washing the feet of their mothers-in-law.

Sitting on stools and speaking face-to-face, the women in Hebei province gently rubbed the feet of their elderly relatives, according to a local television news clip from last week with the headline reading: “I wash the feet of my mother-in-law; we are a harmonious family.”

The event was meant to teach modern children to be grateful to parents and elderly relatives and promote the traditional Chinese virtue of filial piety, the community’s party secretary said on Xingtai Television.

Filial piety is the tradition of honouring elderly relatives and ancestors and is rooted in Confucian literature.

It was just one of many such foot-washing cultural events held across China in recent decades, all of which had the same stated goal of promoting honour and respect for the older generations.

In schools, asking students to help their parents or grandparents wash their feet is still a common homework assignment in moral education classes.

Washing feet is considered a symbol of love and care in China.

Experts told the Post that filial piety has become reinvigorated in recent years, primarily because it has been promoted by Chinese authorities who worry that the 21st century has brought weakened family ties amid an ageing population.

“Those frequently recurring foot-washing ceremonies – and other events to publicly promote filial piety – do not mean that people today are having more gratitude than before. On the contrary, they reveal societal anxiety that the elderly are being neglected as more children live away from home,” said Professor Zhang Yiwu, from the Chinese Department at Peking University in Beijing.

“Bathing one’s feet in hot water is believed to be good for health in traditional Chinese medicine. Therefore, helping older people participate in this beneficial activity is often considered a way to express love and care,” he said.

However, for young people who embrace values including individualism and equality, customs representing filial piety such as foot-washing and kowtowing have become unacceptable.

It is similar to a phenomenon that occurred in the 1910s and 1920s when China’s New Culture Movement took off and young people fought the idea of a society based on hierarchy and obligation.

Cao Youyou, a college student from Shanghai, told the Post: “I hated it when I was asked by my teachers to wash the feet of my parents when I was in secondary school.”

“Why could I not wash their face or hair? Why did it have to be feet? To me, it was because feet are the lowest part of the body, and it means self-sacrifice and that you are 100 per cent humble to the one you are serving,” he said.

He said society should stop promoting these traditions. “We love our parents, but we can show it differently,” he said.

Cao’s interpretation echoed that of Zhu Dake, a well-known professor specialising in Chinese cultural history at Tongji University in Shanghai, who openly criticised such ceremonies over a decade ago.

In 2011, he wrote: “Any action of kneeling down or kowtowing is turning gratitude into obedience and humility. These displays of reverence contradict the values of freedom and equality and, by their nature, have nothing to do with love.”

Criticising the practices as “morality shows”, Zhu said filial piety within families was the foundation for feudal leaders to create obedient subjects, and therefore should be abandoned in modern times.

But despite the criticisms, such “shows” have not stopped over the years.

Indeed, they were praised by the top leadership in 2019 during the 100th anniversary of China’s May 4th Movement, which was born of a desire to abolish antiquated ideologies supported by Confucian traditions, including the reverence for filial piety.

The moral value of “voluntarily passing on the Chinese virtue of filial piety” was written into a national guidance for “ethical citizens” in October of that year.

During a speech given to celebrate the 2019 Lunar New Year, President Xi Jinping brought up filial piety for the first time in his public remarks. He quoted a Confucian text that read, “filial piety is the foundation of all virtues”.

He then linked it with China’s need to tackle its rapidly ageing population, which could affect the productivity of the economy and strain the nation’s social safety nets for the elderly.

“Our society has become an ageing society. Making sure senior people are looked after, emotionally supported, happy and peaceful is related to the harmony and stability of society,” Xi said.

People aged 60 and older totalled 264 million, or 18.7 per cent of China’s population, in the 2020 census. The World Health Organization projected that number would reach 28 per cent by 2040.

Professor Xiao Qunzhong, from the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said: “We, therefore, call 2019 the first year of the People’s Republic’s official promotion of filial piety.”

“We cannot persuade people to believe that filial piety is the root of everything – as it was during the imperial period – but we must admit that it is still valuable today. Especially as we face new problems in the modern era,” he said.

Despite the growth of nursing homes and community-based healthcare in recent years, families remain the primary source of care for China’s elderly population.

“In the past, Chinese people lived in extended families, and there could be seven or more children supporting one old couple. But now, after decades of the one-child policy, a young couple may have to support four elderly relatives, and many younger people have been separated from their elders amid rapid urbanisation,” Xiao explained.

Over the past 30 to 40 years, millions of working-age Chinese people have moved away from rural areas to cities to find higher-paying jobs, often leaving villages populated almost entirely by elderly people.

“Stressing the traditional virtue of filial piety is practically meaningful in this context,” he added.

Hu Xiaoli, one of the daughters-in-law who took part in the foot-washing ceremony in Hebei, she said she hoped this tradition could be passed on within the family and the community.

“My mother-in-law treats us very well, and she treats me like her own daughter. So she deserves to be well respected. And I think this sets a good example for our next generation,” she said in the Xingtai Television report.