Shareholding cooperative companies in Shenzhen and the revival of “filial piety” as a core value of Chinese ethical life

Over millennia, “filial piety” has been a key concept in Confucian thinking and the ethical life of kinship relations, epitomized in the institutions of the lineage system that were especially strong in South China rural society. The lineage system stood at the centre of violent conflicts between kinship particularism and Maoist universalism between 1949 and 1978. This chapter looks at the current revival of filial piety under the auspices of new approaches of the Communist Party towards cultural governance of society, which plays together with the reconstitution of lineages in the course of incorporating villages into the expanding megacities. In Shenzhen, this takes the distinct form of a new kind of corporate organization, the shareholding cooperatives, as hybrids of business entities and grassroots-level administration. We show how these organizations actively engage in promoting filial piety in society while also nurturing their identity as kinship groups. This also triggers new tensions between universalism and particularism as salient in the active role of shareholding cooperatives in the recent COVID-19 pandemic.