CONFUCIUS said that while a man’s parents were alive, he should not travel far afield. Recent economic opportunities have been straining such norms as much as iconoclastic Maoism ever did. So the Communist Party, now more interested in social harmony than revolution, is weighing in. On July 1st it introduced a law to require children to visit or keep in touch with their elderly parents. On the same day, a court in the eastern city of Wuxi ruled in the case of a 77-year-old mother who had sued her daughter for not visiting her and for failing to help her financially. The court ordered the daughter to do both, or face fines or even detention.

Caring for China’s pensioners is becoming one more headache for the party. There are 185m people over 60 today, and that figure will grow to 487m by 2053, according to the China National Committee on Ageing. Yet in a country where tens of millions of people work far from home, the law will prove difficult to enforce, says Hou Yang, a hotel manager in Beijing. Mr Hou hails from Hainan, a southern province two days away by train. Visiting his parents regularly is not practical, he says, nor does he think he will be punished if he fails to do so. “If they want us go back home often,” he says, “they should give us more days of holiday or pay our travel expenses.”