Mencius' words "There are three ways to be unfilial, and the worst of them is to be without issue" have earned him almost universal condemnation. Today, even the Western media, when talking about the imbalance between male and female births in Asia, blame this Confucianist sage's ideas for placing such a heavy burden on later generations of Chinese, and accuse him of "leading people astray" even today.

Why did Mencius utter this "admonition," which from a modern perspective seems deliberately designed to infuriate women's rights groups? And if today, 2000 years later, people are so bent on having a son that they put the ratio of male to female births out of kilter, what does that have to do with the old fellow?

The words "There are three ways to be unfilial, and the worst is to be without issue," come from the first half of the fourth chapter of Mencius, one of the "Four Books" of the Confucianist canon. The whole passage--as explained in most Four Books readers--goes "There are three ways of being unfilial, and the worst is to be without issue. The sage emperor Shun took a wife without first consulting his mother and father, for fear that his unreasoning parents would not permit the marriage, and the family line would be broken. So men of noble character believe that by not telling his parents, Shun acted no less honorably than if he had told them."

Being filial is the main thing

From an anthropological point of view, veneration of and respect for one's ancestors is a universal phenomenon in human culture. Chinese people's "deep gratitude" to their ancestors is expressed in their daily lives through the rituals of ancestor worship.

For the rituals of ancestor worship to be passed down, one must have descendants. Without descendants there would be no-one to carry out the rituals, incense would no longer be burnt for the ancestors, and the family line bearing the ancestral surname would be unable to continue. This would be a great sin. Hence "leaving descendants for one's parents" is one of the ways in which the Chinese express filial piety.

Mencius believed that when Shun took a wife without consulting his parents, he did so to fulfil his own duty in human relationships, to appease the spirits of his ancestors and to avoid making his parents unfilial towards them. Mencius was emphasizing the notion of filial piety current in society at the time.

As for whether the "without issue" in his words was gender-specific, Mencius did not make this clear. But based on conditions in society at that time, Associate Professor Yu Te-hui of the Institute of Ethnic Relations and Culture at National Donghwa University has no doubt that he was referring to male issue.

"But these words are not from one of Mencius' major discourses, they simply reflect the social reality of the time," says Yu Te-hui. Social realities change, but the words have remained, and have become a tool--people today quote the classics to back up whatever argument they want.

What has CVS to do with traditional culture?

Professor Yang Kuo-shu of NTU's psychology department notes that it is a fact that traditional agricultural society was male-centered. But whether the responsibility for this lies with Mencius or the Confucianist culture he represents, is very much open to debate.

Mencius (c. 372-289 BC) was born at the transition from the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) to the Warring States period (475-221 BC). But patriarchal society with its male line of succession had already taken shape during the Shang (c. 17th -c. 11th centuries BC) and the Zhou (c. 11th century - 256 BC), well before the emergence of the Confucianists.

Jeh-hang Lai, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy, observes that even in the Han (206 BC - 220 AD) and Tang (618-907 AD) dynasties, long after patriarchal society was established in China, women not only "showed their face in public," they suffered no social stigma if they divorced and remarried. So perhaps "tradition" was far from the way people now imagine it.

"Traditions are also created by society." As Chang Chueh, coordinator of the Women's Research Program at National Taiwan University's Population Studies Center says, if people today are not willing to promote greater equality between the sexes, they are failing in their own responsibility to themselves. It has nothing to do with the ancients.

But sadly there is no consensus among people today that women deserve equal rights, and people often gloss over the problem by quoting the aphorisms of former ages. Health care officials and medical practitioners all agree that the practice of gender selection can only be brought under control if the "traditional culture" of seeing a lack of descendants as the height of unfiliality can be changed. But, Chen Kuan-cheng believes, simply blaming cultural factors for the use of amniocentesis and other procedures for gender determination "seems to be jumping to conclusions."

In mainland China blame for the glut of boys and dearth of girls is also laid at the door of traditional culture. But without the impetus given by the mainland's one-child policy, would its "little emperors" outnumber their "empresses" by so many? Pushing the blame onto tradition seems to be a way of deflecting doubts raised by the outside world as to whether the policy is reasonable. "Mencius never told anyone to abort pregnancies or kill newborn babies," says Chen Kuan-cheng.

Unfilial posterity?

If all the fault really lies with traditional culture, why is it that according to UN statistics, no imbalance in male and female births has appeared in Japan, where the teachings of Confucius and Mencius are held in no less regard than in our own country?

Liu Tan-kui, a section chief at the Department of Health's Public Health Bureau who is well informed about Japan, says that based on humanitarian considerations, the Japanese government takes the view that rather than using the eugenic approach of diagnosing fetal health prenatally, it is better to improve the care children receive after birth. For this reason it prohibits the use of medical procedures for eugenic diagnosis, and this indirectly prevents their use for gender selection.

As a spin-off from Japan's policy, diagnostic procedures are prevented from being misused to reinforce old values which prize boys above girls. If Mencius knew the practices his own countrymen invoke his name to justify, would he turn in his grave and curse his posterity as unfilial?