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Lu Jiehua (www.anhui.cc): In the past, we had a similar selection for "Five-Virtue Families," which was an honorable title for families outstanding in many aspects, such as being willing to help others, respecting the old and taking care of the young, playing an important role in guiding healthy social customs and values. The selection for "Harmonious Families" is the development of the former one.
But, with the fast paced economic development, family values and family composition have become more diversified. They cannot be evaluated by any standards. This kind of selection shouldn't have rigid specifications. Whether a family is harmonious or not can't be selected but should be a dynamic process that needs long-term accumulation. Harmony between people should be based on communications of hearts and shouldn't have objective indexes. Among the 27 items of the new standards, some are about material wealth in families, such as owning more than 300 books, traveling frequently and surfing online frequently. These indexes are way too utilitarian. Even if some families are granted the title, they might not be a good example or a positive guidance.
Liang Jiangtao (news.bandao.cn): For the past five decades, the title of "Five-Virtue Families" was what people used to strive to achieve. Now the title is going to be replaced by "Harmonious Families" with a set of new standards. But does that mean all standards have to be about numbers? Low-income families have to make a flat refusal for the selection because of the high economic threshold.
Access to the Internet, shopping, owning books and traveling are all about money. If a family doesn't have enough money, it can't meet those standards. The new set of standards ignores harmony in spiritual factors. Can we say laborers' families are not harmonious? Are poor families whose members are willing to help others not harmonious? Selection based on standards about money has lost the charitable meaning and is creating disharmony.
This inappropriate set of standards results from the unpractical thoughts of the organizers. They only focus on the middle and upper classes and ignore the lower one. Nobody can say no to low-income families in the selection of "Harmonious Families." We hope organizers can listen carefully to more opinions and suggestions. In that case, more ordinary or poor families can have an opportunity in the selection. Otherwise, the seemingly fancy "Harmonious Families" selection will eventually turn into a show and be meaningless.
Zhu Jiafa (opinion.people.com.cn): The new set of standards is a joke to us. It aims at selecting rich families instead of harmonious ones.
The standards will cause strong repulsion from common people. We should notice why this kind of abnormal and unreasonable standards could even be brought up. These standards have nothing to do with morality. They spread money worship and cause immeasurable damage to society. Organizers think they have taken a step forward along with the times but those standards mean moral decline to us.
Traveling frequently, shopping and having dinner in restaurants are good, but not all families can afford that. Even if some families are in poverty, they can still be defined as harmonious when members of those families have great relationships with each other.
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