孝顺 xiào shùn
Devotion to parents — the first virtue of the Confucian home.
The short answer
孝 (xiào) is filial devotion — the duty of children to care for, respect, and honor their parents. 孝顺 (xiàoshùn), the everyday verb, means to be a good, obedient child to them.
What it means
Confucius ranked the virtues, and family duty came first: of a hundred virtues, 孝 leads. The idea is not only obedience — it is gratitude made structural. Your body, your education, your start in life came from your parents; a lifetime of care is the repayment.
In practice, 孝顺 covers visiting, calling, obeying reasonable wishes, supporting parents in old age, and — the sensitive part — deferring to them on big choices: career, marriage, grandchildren. Chinese readers can argue all day about where devotion ends and control begins; the argument itself assumes 孝 is real.
How people use it
孝顺的孩子 — a good, devoted child, the highest domestic compliment. 不孝 — unfilial; among the worst things said of a person. The classic advice 百善孝为先, “of all virtues, filial piety first”, still hangs in living rooms.
Watch the grammar of care: adult children 常回家看看 — regularly come home to look in on parents. A 2013 amendment to the Elderly Rights Law actually urges exactly that phrase in statute — law catching up to vocabulary.
Where it comes from
孝 is older than the pencil that writes it: the bronze-script character draws a child beneath an elder. Confucius and Mencius made it the root of all other virtues — a person who loves their parents will not easily wrong others — and the Classic of Filial Piety turned it into a complete social theory.
The tradition collected famous examplars: the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, folk tales of devotion so extreme that later generations argued about them. Modern China keeps the core and debates the extremes, with the same word: what does true 孝顺 require?
In use
2 examples常回家看看，是孝顺最基本的样子。
Coming home often to see your parents is what filial devotion looks like at its most basic.
他工作再忙，每个周末都回去陪父母，特别孝顺。
However busy work gets, he goes back to keep his parents company every weekend — truly devoted.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.