The State-Family Narrative and the Responsive State

On February 5, I delivered a presentation on China’s legal response system to domestic violence at Emory Law School, in which I introduced the concept of the state-family narrative in China. During the discussion, Professor Martha Fineman invited me to elaborate on this concept and, in particular, to consider what role the state should play in improving the legal response system to domestic violence. At the time, I did not provide a satisfactory explanation—partly because of time constraints, but also because I had not yet fully reflected on the similarities and differences between the state-family narrative and Prof. Fineman’s idea of the responsive state.

After the presentation, several participants emailed me expressing curiosity about this issue. More recently, the dynamics of the U.S.–China trade war have also prompted me to see new opportunities to engage with this question. I now believe it may be a useful moment to offer a brief introduction to the state-family narrative that has shaped Chinese history, and to consider its implications for contemporary legal and political debates.

As Professor Fineman often notes, the state has always been acting; the critical questions are whose interests it acts for, and in what manner it acts. Implicit in this formulation is that the state stands at some distance from other social institutions and individuals under the classical social contract tradition, securing protection in exchange for citizens’ partial surrender of their liberty. Within that distance, the state must articulate a justification for its actions—for example: rebuilding individual resilience in light of human vulnerability. Thus, the concept of the responsive state emerged in response to American individualism and anti-statism (particularly opposition to state intervention). Put simply, it seeks to establish a rationale for why the state has an obligation to provide conditions for resilience-building.

This broader premise—deeply rooted in American culture and social history—is essential for an international audience to understand to grasp the framework of vulnerability theory. From my own experience of living and studying in different countries, I have also observed that this theory, paradoxically, has found greater resonance outside the US than within it. Precisely because anti-statist culture and ideology are so deeply entrenched in America, vulnerability theory has flourished more prominently in European welfare states, particularly in the Nordic countries, than in its country of origin.

In China—arguably a country that stands at the very opposite of anti-statism—vulnerability theory, and particularly the discussion of the responsive state, has yet to gain traction within the legal academy. In a previous blog, I examined one reason related to feminist cultural communities; here, I want to expand on another: the Chinese state-family narrative.

In China, while there is nominally some distance between the state, other social institutions, and individuals, this distance is in fact blurred by the state-family narrative. The state is endowed with the role of being the parent of all the people. Just as parents have a natural obligation and authority to care for their children, the state is likewise understood to possess both the duty and the authority to manage various aspects of individual life.

In the era of the imperial dynasties, the royal family was regarded as the model of the individual family, and the emperor was seen as the father of all the people. The state-family narrative thus operates through a logic of analogy: by likening the state to the family and the ruler’s benevolence to parental care, it enables the public to better comprehend and accept state governance over their lives.

This logic is difficult to grasp in much of the Western world—especially for Americans—and is often explained simply as the absence of individualism in China. While such a conclusion is not without merit, I believe the issue lies deeper: we must ask whether the power and obligation of the state to “parent” its citizens is inherently tilted toward empowering the state rather than the individual. If so, the critical questions then become: who defines the standards of successful parenting and who determines what counts as a qualified citizen?

Many Chinese people have heard parents say to teachers when sending their children to school: “If the child misbehaves, please discipline him/her as you see fit. You are the teacher, and we trust you.” Implicit in this statement is often a tacit acceptance of mild corporal punishment. Thus, the values of respecting teachers, revering elders, caring for the young, and the state-family narrative all share a common logic. This is also why one frequently encounters expressions on Chinese social media such as “Motherland has protected us well.” Such trust in the state is, without doubt, socially constructed. In other words, the public’s expectation of protection cannot be explained simply through the lens of paternalism.

I believe the longevity of the state-family narrative rests upon a deeper, constructed foundation: a profound longing for the survival of civilization. Recently, during the trade war, when a BBC journalist asked a Chinese scholar what would happen if China lost access to the U.S. market, the scholar responded by saying that China had endured for 5,000 years, most of that time without the U.S. Yet within this 5,000-year history, Chinese students are required to study in depth the so-called Century of Humiliation—a period during which China, as a civilization-state, faced the near risk of annihilation.

Many people recognize that the construction of China’s social apparatus and ideological framework revolves around the Century of Humiliation. But why is this century perceived as so terrifying? Because it strikes at the very heart of the state-family logic that has long underpinned Chinese civilization: without the state, people lose their shared family, and without this shared family, even individual families—or individuals themselves—cannot survive.

Here we can see that this chain of logic differs fundamentally from the dominant Western human rights narrative, in which the individual is assumed to be naturally endowed with freedom, cedes part of that freedom, and the state, on the basis of this cession, provides protection to the individual. In contrast, the state-family narrative presupposes two conditions:

1. The state has full and sufficient capacity to provide adequate protection to individuals or individual families.
2. Individuals or individual families are incapable of adequately protecting themselves.

The first one may suggest an overconfidence on the part of the state. This could perhaps be connected to China’s history as an agrarian civilization, which required intense levels of collective cooperation among tribes. Yet even so, the long-standing small peasant economy in China was in fact highly self-sufficient, and local communities could often resist certain disasters on their own. This raises the question of whether the second condition reflects an undue lack of confidence in individuals or individual families.

Setting aside these materialist considerations for the moment, what matters more is how, at the cultural, societal, and legal levels, this narrative has been consolidated. The Century of Humiliation stands out as perhaps the most powerful and unshakable justification for the state-family narrative in nearly 5,000 years of Chinese history.

The ultimate outcome is that the cohesion born of the fear of losing the family has led Chinese people, across generations, to evaluate historical figures’ actions with relative indifference to dynastic changes or shifts in ruling parties—even to the extent of affirming the Nationalist Party’s contributions to resisting Japanese aggression (though such recognition is always paired with, and overshadowed by, a much stronger emphasis on the Communist Party’s role, which is supported by a far greater volume of films and public discourse).

Thus, I believe that the fundamental difference in underlying values between China and the U.S. does not lie in their political systems, but in the logic by which the relationship between state and family is constructed, a logic that profoundly shapes citizens’ imagination of the state. I have long felt that the logic behind the state-family narrative makes it morally difficult for China to justify to itself embarking on a fully “imperialist path”. Even in its competition with the U.S., China is far more likely to draw upon the ancient tributary system to secure benefits.

In the collective memory of the Chinese people, ancient territorial expansion has largely been erased, while the state’s image has become deeply bound to that of a strict yet benevolent parent. To act as a conventional colonial power would fundamentally undermine citizens’ trust in the state: if, as a parent, you could mercilessly kill the children of other families, then surely you could also harm your own. This is why even in ancient times, China’s expansion was framed with a strong emphasis on moral legitimacy (shi chu you ming 师出有名). Historical practice shows, for instance, that military campaigns were often justified only after Chinese envoys died abroad, thereby granting the empire a “just cause” to intervene.

Angela Meng argues that Washington overestimates Beijing’s desire to become the world’s number one power, because China’s cultural foundation is one of preservation, stability, defensiveness, and self-protection. It is only the education of the “Century of Humiliation” that has instilled in Chinese people the belief that one must be absolutely strong in order to have the power to choose neutrality. Whether this overestimation is objectively justified is debatable, but I have always believed that the greatest obstacle to China’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific lies not in its military strength, economic capacity, or mobilization ability, but in overcoming this moral barrier. Once that threshold is crossed, it will inevitably trigger a profound domestic crisis—one that would shake the centuries-old trust Chinese citizens have placed in the state, a trust constructed through the state-family narrative.

For U.S.–China cooperation to occur, China must also overcome this moral hurdle, for the same challenge persists: it would take at least three generations of education for Chinese people to accept becoming partners with the very kind of “imperialist powers” they most despise. A very contemporary example lies in the deep sympathy many Chinese netizens express for Ukraine on social media, a sympathy rooted in their collective memory of China’s own modern history of wars and indemnities.

With this perspective in mind, China’s domestic image-building strategies on social media become more evident: the government works hard to project the image of a morally harmless parent—most often “Motherland”—who only wants to protect her “children.” In this framing, military expansion is tightly bound to the parental duty of protection. This strong association naturally extends values of self-defense, motherhood, and justice, while significantly obscuring the patriarchal nature of politics. It can even serve as a powerful justification to silence sensitive issues in the name of “the greater good.”

Thus, regardless of whether the Chinese government actually provides military supplies to certain countries, such news is almost always downplayed or reframed domestically as “Motherland earning money to raise us.” To some degree, the government also maintains deliberate distance from direct intervention or overt support, even at the cost of losing opportunities to build firm allies—precisely because it understands that the core of the state-family narrative lies in preserving its moral legitimacy at home.

By comparison, the construction of America’s democratic value system over the past several decades has been aimed primarily outward. Given China’s long-standing principle of “not interfering in the private affairs of other families,” many Chinese genuinely struggle to understand why the U.S. is so eager to “meddle in other people’s business.” As a result, they find it difficult to grasp that U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific may in large part stem from its commitment to multiparty democratic values. Instead, they tend to interpret America through the lens of the state-family narrative—casting the U.S. as a country that wants to “play father” to others. From the perspective of cultural studies, this explains why in Chinese popular discourse the image of the U.S. is sometimes humorously constructed as a “powerful patriarch who always likes to step in and manage the neighbors’ household affairs.”

So, does Trump’s “America First” logic, to some extent, correct the dissatisfaction of some Americans who feel the U.S. government invests too much abroad? In the short term, perhaps, by appealing to emotional value and temporarily numbing public discontent. But in the long run, I believe it does not. This is because scaling back external commitments to shared ideological values is not especially difficult (and in practice, much of this has already happened). The deeper problem is that the ideal role of the American state at home remains unfulfilled: it has neither moved toward the model of the responsive state, which assumes responsibility for rebuilding resilience, nor created a state-family narrative in which the state takes on a parental role that reconciles value conflicts. As a result, the state continues to be perceived largely as inactive on many pressing domestic issues.

Thus, while funds previously used for external commitments have been pulled back, administrative staff downsized, and university funding cut, there has been little noticeable improvement in the daily lives of ordinary citizens.

That said, one must acknowledge that Trump rather cleverly combined the third core theme of American culture—liberalism—with individualism and anti-statism, blurring these issues to some extent on the financial and economic level. Through his direct Twitter appeals to invest, as well as deregulation in the cryptocurrency sector, he presented supporters with the image of potential or actual financial gains in the market. His identity as a businessman gave this strategy a natural credibility, leading supporters to regard him as one of the rare power-holders willing to share investment opportunities. Short-term profits did indeed provide psychological comfort for many supporters, and this comfort itself reflects a distinctly American feature: the hope among many that they might, at an individual level, realize a new version of the American Dream.

Of course, this was accompanied by other forms of emotional reassurance, such as projecting U.S. dominance on the international political stage. Yet these financial and economic strategies still could not yield substantial benefits for most people. Financial markets—and especially the emerging crypto sector—are highly opaque and marked by steep technical and even community-based barriers to entry. Institutionally, the SEC’s Accredited Investor rules have, in some sense, carried forward the logic of the earlier Qualified Purchaser rules in private equity, restricting access to high-quality crypto products to those with significant assets. This only deepened wealth inequality and created more zero-sum dynamics. In turbulent markets, fear and shame prevent most people from telling their stories of failure, while the rare success cases are disproportionately celebrated. I believe many investors who rose from the bottom and achieved economic success in crypto—if they are honest and compassionate—would deeply understand the immense risks implied in my words, risks that can devastate families and lives.

This, perhaps, reveals the critical difference between the American constellation of anti-statism, individualism, and liberalism, and China’s state-family narrative, in terms of how personal capacity is conceptualized. It is ultimately a spectrum: to what extent does the individual believe in their own ability to withstand storms and upheavals, and to what extent are they willing, when overwhelmed by such storms, to relinquish selfhood, pride or even “shame” in seeking rescue from the state.

The greatest problem within the state-family narrative is that the confidence of individuals and individual families is marginalized, while the state’s parenting power is excessively amplified. This allows the state, in the name of “parenthood,” to almost unilaterally define what counts as a qualified citizen, regulate the entry requirements for a “qualified family,” and decide when it may intervene in the private lives of individuals and families. In this sense, the concept of the responsive state could in fact be extended to the Chinese context to address precisely this issue of the state’s obligations: if state care were grounded in the broader recognition of human vulnerability as a shared destiny, then individuals would also hold equal moral standing to negotiate with the state over the definition of many of these standards.

In the U.S., however, the application of the responsive state may hold even greater potential in the future. Yet this may not happen until the tide recedes—when people begin to realize that seemingly fair new opportunities are still shaped by structural injustice; when they recognize, more plainly, that no amount of wealth can purchase everything; when they acknowledge that their inherent worth as human beings entitles them to demand that the state fulfill its obligations; when they see that refusing to admit their vulnerability is not a sign of strength; and when they accept that limitless freedom can harm others and also leave themselves unhappy. This may take a very long time—the darkness may persist until dawn—but I remain convinced that the U.S.’s powerful capacity for institutional self-correction holds great promise that it may ultimately find this balance.