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Modernity and the Chinese Moral Crisis

These two fine books, released within months of each other, use differing terms but resonating conceptual apparatuses to explore the “moral crisis” of contemporary China. For both authors, this crisis is a reality, and both of them offer prescriptions for its partial resolution. Both authors ground their perspectives in disciplines of the humanities—literary criticism for Haiyan Lee and philosophy for Jiwei Ci—and each takes what I would call a modernist perspective vis-a-vis China’s moral crisis. That is, they see the practices and dynamics of moral reasoning associated with traditional China as inadequate for a China that has modernized rapidly over the past 35 years. Moreover, each author sees the Maoist decades as having reinforced certain aspects of traditional moral reasoning and perceives the current regime’s reliance on remnants of Maoist/Leninist processes of governing as inimical to the development of healthier modes of moral reasoning. Their positing of an overlap between traditionalism and Maoism could be summed up by the title of Andrew G. Walder’s classic book, Communist Neo-Traditionalism. Finally, each author focuses on questions of selfhood and processes of developing the type of self that is able to reason morally.