Moral China in the Age of Reform

This book is a study of post-Mao Chinese moral subjectivity and a philosophical inquiry into the relation between moral subjectivity and freedom.

Jiwei Ci (Author)

9781107646315, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 August 2014

244 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

'This thought-provoking volume by Ci seeks to examine the moral crisis in post-Mao China by treating it as a mirror of the deep contradictions created in the subject as well as in society … The author suggests that the positive future of China depends … on full cognizance of what it means to live under modern conditions of liberty, and such cognizance involves both acceptance of liberty as constitutive of modern life and awareness of its moral and political liabilities in the absence of a dialectical relation with the good … Summing up: recommended.' S. K. Ma, Choice

Three decades of dizzying change in China's economy and society have left a tangible record of successes and failures. Less readily accessible but of no less consequence is the story, as illuminated in this book, of what China's reform has done to its people as moral and spiritual beings. Jiwei Ci examines the moral crisis in post-Mao China as a mirror of deep contradictions in the new self as well as in society. He seeks to show that lack of freedom, understood as the moral and political conditions for subjectivity under modern conditions of life, lies at the root of these contradictions, just as enhanced freedom offers the only appropriate escape from them. Rather than a ready-made answer, however, freedom is treated throughout as a pressing question in China's search for a better moral and political culture.

Introduction: why the question of freedom is unavoidable
1. An anatomy of the moral crisis
2. Political order, moral disorder
3. Freedom as a Chinese question
4. Freedom and its epistemological conditions
5. Freedom and identification
6. Neither devotion nor introjection
7. The insult of poverty
8. Democracy as unmistakable reality and uncertain prospect
9. Freedom's unfinished task
10. China's space of moral possibilities.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA]