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The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination . Haiyan Lee . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2014. 362 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8047-8591-4
Book Reviews
China's massive urbanization has made associating with strangers central to daily life. In her masterful study of China's evolving cultures, Haiyan Lee examines encounters with ghosts and apparitions, animals, women (especially unattached women), maids and tenants, bourgeois intellectuals exiled to rural areas, class enemies, peasant migrants, and foreigners. Through keen analyses of stories, novels, films, a museum and television serials, Lee offers not only a "genealogy of stranger sociality" (p. 10), but richly informed insights into cosmopolitanism, trust, hospitality, employment relations, and a host of other topics integral to China's culture of neoliberalism.
At heart, Lee's subject is ethics: "we act ethically not only when we care for our family and inner circles of friends and associates (zijiren) but when we answer the summons of another being whose claim on us is not grounded in blood or law, but his or her or its vulnerability" (p. 30). Attentive to history, Lee contrasts stranger sociality with the "cozy oases" of traditional Confucian kinship, patronage networks, native place sentiment and other close social...