I'm not an online shopping-holic. Every time that I shopped on Taobao.com, China's leading e-commerce platform, I am amazed at the range of products it provides. There's everything you can think of, and nothing you can't buy. Now the shopping list includes "filial piety."

Some vendors on Taobao have recently been promoting a new service that hires people to drop by for a visit to the buyer's parents. They charge based on distance and time, but not love.

This service was introduced at the beginning of this month when the country enacted a law aimed at compelling adult children to visit their aging parents.

It may sound weird that young adults need to be "compelled" to see their parents in China, where filial piety is arguably the most treasured virtue of traditional society. Many lament the corrosion of China's moral integrity that can only be brought by the law.

But China's younger generation certainly do not want to see a rift between them and their parents, though it has already been felt.

As China's economy began to flourish, a great number of young people moved to prosperous cities but left their aging parents in hometowns far away.

Meanwhile, they often suffer stress from work and the rising costs of living in cities. Companies only offer negligible annual paid leave for them to go back home. All these make filial visits expensive and logistically difficult.

When there is need, there is a market. That explains why some Taobao vendors came up with the idea of visiting others' parents.

However, this business model is nothing but a byproduct of the conflicts in China's development, the deterioration of traditional values and the incomplete social welfare system.

The law that requires young adults to visit their parents mainly wants to offer the elderly emotional comfort. Such comfort comes from seeing the person they miss and has nothing to do with material affluence.

It is regrettable that the new service some Taobao shop owners promote treats emotions as commodities, part of a trend in Chinese society where people are obsessed with money and materialism and believe cash can buy them everything.

Will this business model gain any supporting voices?

Just ask yourself: When you are getting older, do you want to be visited by a stranger in the name of paid filial piety?