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Although it is widely believed that post-Mao China has fallen into a moral crisis, there are few scholarly analyses of its nature, causes, and consequences. Jiwei Ci's Moral China in the Age of Reform1 fills this gap by giving an unusually penetrating and insightful account of this crisis. There is much in Ci's account that one can find thought-provoking and enlightening. Any good analysis of a crisis not only gives a good diagnosis but also sheds light on a possible solution. While the diagnosis of China's problem occupies a large part of the book, in a tentative yet careful manner Ci does suggest a way out. In my comment here, I focus on his suggestions as to how China can accomplish this.
For Ci, China has been plagued not just with one crisis but with a several. First is the crisis of justice and social order in the domain of the right, manifested in the massive violations of basic ethical and legal norms in society. This has been caused by a number of interrelated crises in the domain of the good, which include the Socialist- Maoist conception of what the good is, the problem of moral authority and moral willingness, and the crisis of the moral subject. Today, China finds itself in a painful and uncertain transition of moral subjectivity - the old moral subject of the Maoists is defunct, and a new kind of moral subject in the reform era has yet to appear. The new social and economic conditions - characterized by individuals having de facto freedom of choice along with their daily responsibilities - call for a different kind of moral subject, one that is defined by freedom. This freedom is not mere de facto freedom, but freedom raised to the level of a publicly recognized value and personal entitlement, bestowing upon individuals "dignity and worthiness of respect" (p. 4). "Until this new moral subject takes shape," Ci says, the Chinese people "shall remain in the grip of the moral crisis" (p. 3).
The arrival of the new moral subject is not yet in sight; for decades the contemporary Chinese political structure
has been consistently devoid of internal incentives to promote or allow incremental growth in those virtues and capacities associated with...