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With her acute observation and nuanced analysis of moral discourse and practice in a rural community, Ellen Oxfeld has made an original and important contribution to the fast-growing literature on contemporary China as well as to the anthropology of morality. Her findings are frequently refreshing, sometimes inspiring and, overall, reassuring as they convince the reader that, despite all the recent scares of moral crisis or decay, there is still a well-maintained moral order and a set of moral principles that enable the residents of a Hakka village in south-east China to make sense of their lives and others'.
The book is divided into two sections. Part one offers a brief review of the existing literature on moral changes in post-Mao China, lays out the basic categories and theoretical tools that Oxfeld employs to scrutinize her ethnographic data, and introduces her longitudinal fieldwork. All of these are skilfully done and quite helpful in orienting the reader. The highlight of part one, however, is her discovery of an important notion in Chinese culture, namely, liangxin which has been painstakingly translated in English as "conscience." I would like to equate the importance of Oxfeld's effort to unpack the rich meanings of liangxin with the extensive studies on guanxi and renqing in the 1980s and 1990s. Liangxin indeed features centrally in both moral discourse and practice among the Chinese people across all walks of life and...