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Moral ambivalence in modern China
Perspectives
Book Moral ambivalence in modern China While doing anthropological fieldwork last year in Heilongjiang, in far northeastern China, I met a schoolteacher. It turned out that she had taught her own son what she considers a traditional Chinese approach to education—that he should cooperate with other students and not be selfish and competitive. But when her son returned from university for a visit he told her: “Ma, your training of me failed—everybody there is selfish! I’m the only non-selfish student at my university and they all think I’m stupid!” Her reaction to this reproach was ambivalent. She worries that she may, indeed, have failed as a mother. Yet she also continues to think that her son’s inclination to cooperate rather than compete is something admirable. This story of ambivalence raises more general questions about the ethical and moral condition of China today. For example, are Chinese people typically altruistic in their dealings with others or are they becoming more selfish as a market system takes over? Are they focused on personal advancement, or do they care about the future of China as a whole? How likely are they to help strangers in need? How common is depression, for example, or suicide? The authors of Deep China take up these and other questions—and the answers they provide turn out to be rather complicated, as one might expect. On altruism: different forms of volunteering have surged ahead in recent years, and yet there has also been a rash of cases in which “good Samaritans” are extorted by those they try to help. On depression: until recently it was treated as a kind of nervous/bodily exhaustion, with the result that more or less nobody was said to have depression in the western sense. Now, it has become far more widespread, which coincides nicely with the rampant commercialisation of psychological distress in China. www.thelancet.com Vol 379 March 3, 2012
In trying to make sense of these complex (sometimes contradictory) trends, the contributors to this book focus on what they call “deep China”, by which is meant the “emotional, perceptual and moral experiences” of ordinary people. As is well known, ideas about personhood and morality have been in a state of flux in the post-Mao era, but with an increased emphasis on rights and self-realisation over obligations and self-sacrifice. As a result, individuals are not quite sure what to do in many situations—and also not quite sure how others will judge them for their actions.
“… Kleinman notes that, during his decades of research in China, one of the most striking things has been the upward trajectory of the concern with personal happiness” Of course, mixed feelings are at the heart of ethical discourse and moral practice in all human societies. If life were simple, we wouldn’t have to think about morality very much—but life isn’t simple. What is striking in the case of China is that this “ordinary” moral ambivalence has played itself out against the backdrop of massive social experimentation. What if we try to wipe out our traditional cultural values and practices more or less overnight (as happened during the Cultural Revolution)? What if we restrict families to having one child (as happened with the family planning policy)? What if we take our rural youth and move them, en masse, to the cities (as is happening with the current wave of rural-to-urban migration)? As anthropologists and others have shown, these experiments have generated an abundance of unintended consequences. For example, the socalled one child policy was built on an
explicit anti-reproduction message, but the promotion of contraception may also have spread the—largely implicit—message that sex for its own sake was inevitable and possibly even good. As Everett Yuehong Zhang explains in this book: “Never before [in China] were sexual pleasure and reproduction so forcefully, openly and officially separated, and the former so clearly justified.” He concludes that the policy—a drastic state intervention in private life, intended to slash the birth rate—unwittingly helped open the door to sexual liberation for millions of ordinary people. And yet liberation has, in turn, generated new ethical dilemmas for them, for example, in relation to sex work. Most of the book’s authors are medical anthropologists and psychiatrists and their focus is mainly on individual and social problems of one kind or another—illness, unhappiness, medical fraud, conflict within families, discrimination. From an ethical point of view, problems are interesting. Yet as Arthur Kleinman points out in his thought-provoking concluding chapter, the story of modern China’s “deep” side isn’t intrinsically depressing. On the contrary, Kleinman notes that, during his decades of research in China, one of the most striking things has been the upward trajectory of the concern with personal happiness. This can be interpreted as a rise in selfishness, a further sign of China’s relentless individualisation. And yet some of it sounds like a good thing. A 75-year-old grandmother in Shanghai tells Kleinman: “I meditate. I practice qigong. My husband and I like to do [ballroom] dancing. We are happy. We don’t often look back. Why do it? It’s better to enjoy ourselves now. We are old and we are happy.”
Deep China: the Moral Life of the Person Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, Guo Jinhua. University of California Press, 2012. Pp 322. $26·95 (£18·95). ISBN 9780520269453
Charles Stafford C.Staff[email protected]
793
Book Moral ambivalence in modern China While doing anthropological fieldwork last year in Heilongjiang, in far northeastern China, I met a schoolteacher. It turned out that she had taught her own son what she considers a traditional Chinese approach to education—that he should cooperate with other students and not be selfish and competitive. But when her son returned from university for a visit he told her: “Ma, your training of me failed—everybody there is selfish! I’m the only non-selfish student at my university and they all think I’m stupid!” Her reaction to this reproach was ambivalent. She worries that she may, indeed, have failed as a mother. Yet she also continues to think that her son’s inclination to cooperate rather than compete is something admirable. This story of ambivalence raises more general questions about the ethical and moral condition of China today. For example, are Chinese people typically altruistic in their dealings with others or are they becoming more selfish as a market system takes over? Are they focused on personal advancement, or do they care about the future of China as a whole? How likely are they to help strangers in need? How common is depression, for example, or suicide? The authors of Deep China take up these and other questions—and the answers they provide turn out to be rather complicated, as one might expect. On altruism: different forms of volunteering have surged ahead in recent years, and yet there has also been a rash of cases in which “good Samaritans” are extorted by those they try to help. On depression: until recently it was treated as a kind of nervous/bodily exhaustion, with the result that more or less nobody was said to have depression in the western sense. Now, it has become far more widespread, which coincides nicely with the rampant commercialisation of psychological distress in China. www.thelancet.com Vol 379 March 3, 2012
In trying to make sense of these complex (sometimes contradictory) trends, the contributors to this book focus on what they call “deep China”, by which is meant the “emotional, perceptual and moral experiences” of ordinary people. As is well known, ideas about personhood and morality have been in a state of flux in the post-Mao era, but with an increased emphasis on rights and self-realisation over obligations and self-sacrifice. As a result, individuals are not quite sure what to do in many situations—and also not quite sure how others will judge them for their actions.
“… Kleinman notes that, during his decades of research in China, one of the most striking things has been the upward trajectory of the concern with personal happiness” Of course, mixed feelings are at the heart of ethical discourse and moral practice in all human societies. If life were simple, we wouldn’t have to think about morality very much—but life isn’t simple. What is striking in the case of China is that this “ordinary” moral ambivalence has played itself out against the backdrop of massive social experimentation. What if we try to wipe out our traditional cultural values and practices more or less overnight (as happened during the Cultural Revolution)? What if we restrict families to having one child (as happened with the family planning policy)? What if we take our rural youth and move them, en masse, to the cities (as is happening with the current wave of rural-to-urban migration)? As anthropologists and others have shown, these experiments have generated an abundance of unintended consequences. For example, the socalled one child policy was built on an
explicit anti-reproduction message, but the promotion of contraception may also have spread the—largely implicit—message that sex for its own sake was inevitable and possibly even good. As Everett Yuehong Zhang explains in this book: “Never before [in China] were sexual pleasure and reproduction so forcefully, openly and officially separated, and the former so clearly justified.” He concludes that the policy—a drastic state intervention in private life, intended to slash the birth rate—unwittingly helped open the door to sexual liberation for millions of ordinary people. And yet liberation has, in turn, generated new ethical dilemmas for them, for example, in relation to sex work. Most of the book’s authors are medical anthropologists and psychiatrists and their focus is mainly on individual and social problems of one kind or another—illness, unhappiness, medical fraud, conflict within families, discrimination. From an ethical point of view, problems are interesting. Yet as Arthur Kleinman points out in his thought-provoking concluding chapter, the story of modern China’s “deep” side isn’t intrinsically depressing. On the contrary, Kleinman notes that, during his decades of research in China, one of the most striking things has been the upward trajectory of the concern with personal happiness. This can be interpreted as a rise in selfishness, a further sign of China’s relentless individualisation. And yet some of it sounds like a good thing. A 75-year-old grandmother in Shanghai tells Kleinman: “I meditate. I practice qigong. My husband and I like to do [ballroom] dancing. We are happy. We don’t often look back. Why do it? It’s better to enjoy ourselves now. We are old and we are happy.”
Deep China: the Moral Life of the Person Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, Guo Jinhua. University of California Press, 2012. Pp 322. $26·95 (£18·95). ISBN 9780520269453
Charles Stafford C.Staff[email protected]
793