Filial piety is a core value in ancient Chinese culture, and it still exerts significant influence on the attitudes, behavior and daily life of Chinese people today. At present, China is facing an increasingly aging population and the concern how to properly care for the elderly. Through the vertical review of filial piety in China’s history, two constant elements, namely support and respect, stands out among China’s traditions. There is an argument that addressing the contemporary elderly care problem requires the adequate support from two perspectives, material support from families and societies for the aged and spiritual caring for them. It is further argued that any approaches aimed at addressing contemporary elderly care issue should take into consideration the actual social and culture conditions in China, including the cultural traditions of filial piety.

The first mass migration in China took place at the end of the Western Jin, which resulted in the southward transfer of the Central Plains Culture and brought about huge social changes. Such social changes exerted significant impacts on the gentry of the Jin Dynasty. This paper used a huge volume of Classical Chinese legacy text of Jin gentry members. We used CC-LIWC to calculate frequencies of different word categories used in these text contents and conducted an analysis of variance to measure significant differences between the three groups. We found 16 categories of words with significant differences and calculated their effect sizes, such as tense markers (tensem), F = 3.588, P < 0.05, η2 = 0.034; modal particles (modal_pa), F = 3.468, P < 0.05, η2 = 0.053; words for affective processes (affect), F = 3.096, P < 0.05, η2 = 0.028; words for cognitive processes (cogproc), F = 3.308, P < 0.05, η2 = 0.031; words for perceptual processes (percept), F = 7.137, P < 0.05, η2 = 0.06. Combining the psycholinguistics of the 16 categories of words and researches of historians on the Jin Dynasty, we then analyzed the direct and indirect, immediate and long-lasting psycholinguistic impacts of this mass migration on the gentry themselves and their descendants.

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