Ci Jiwei’s Moral China in the Age of Reform argues that China, since the collapse of Maoist communism, has been facing a profound moral crisis with no end in sight.1 He attributes many reasons to this moral crisis, such as the faulty nature of the Chinese Party-Government and the lack of past moral standards. His work engages in interesting analytical philosophy with the influence of Nietzsche and Foucault, yet is often too philosophical and anecdotal for what he identifies as a real problem affecting over a billion people.
In his first chapter, Ci writes that China’s moral crisis is greater than any other societies’ and that every aspect of society is implicated. The nature of this crisis is that cooperation is breached on a massive scale; that elementary norms are violated; and that this state of affairs is normalised. Evidence of this is the prevalence of unsafe foods and medicine, poor quality of water and dangerous levels of traffic.
As the book progresses, he describes many reasons for why this moral crisis has come to be. For example, the end of communism saw the rise of individualism, in which ordinary people became uninterested in collective endeavours and thus abandoned altruism. His third chapter particularly deals with what he calls the progression from utopianism to hedonism via nihilism – that is, the progression from communist hopes to the open pursuit of wealth and pleasure through the erosion of the belief in communism.2 Yet also bearing responsibility for the moral crisis is the Party-Government, which has designated itself as the initiator and authoriser of morals and norms, yet is understood by nearly everyone to be corrupt. The Party-Government has replaced what Confucianism was for traditional China and what communism was for Maoist China; but unlike Confucianism and communism, the perception of the Party-Government is not as infallible.
To combat this moral crisis Ci recommends a number of liberal reforms. He believes that democracy is a positive influence on society, as individuals contribute to the maintenance of societal norms; and that an increased presence of checks and balance limits corruption. However, this is where Ci begins to partly contradict himself; for he also writes that too much liberalism (i.e. individuality) can lead to selfishness, and he attacks the ‘superficial criticisms’ of China for its supposed lack of freedom when compared to Western societies.3
Although Moral China in the Age of Reform is interesting for its analytical philosophy, its real-world applications fall short. Firstly, it relies on mostly anecdotal evidence to confirm the presence of a moral crisis: reused cooking oil and overly-negative news stories from Jiaodian fangtan are definitely problems, but not evidence of a widescale moral collapse which has occurred since (not during) the reign of Mao. Widespread corruption is similarly anecdotal; China is only ranked 76th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, on par with the countries of Moldova and North Macedonia.4 This does not seem to suggest the vast and globally unique “moral crisis” China finds itself in.
Secondly, Ci engages in very strict analytical philosophy to describe the every motivation and moral character of over a billion people. It must be questioned if it really is the case that every person in China, deciding the practices of their everyday lives, enact moral agency either through freedom or identification.
Finally, Ci seems to support a form of Chinese exceptionalism. He criticises Thomas Metzger’s A Cloud across the Pacific – a book, as Ci writes, about the ‘profound’ differences between China and the West – because it makes too many comparisons between China and the West.5
But these criticisms should not undermine Ci’s entire book; Moral China in the Age of Reform is a deeply analytical and profoundly interesting evaluation of modern Chinese society, a cultural monolith with huge influence on the state of the world now and into the future. It will almost definitely remain a classic in the decades following its publication.