A Confucian Notion of the Common Good for Contemporary China
While China has become a worldly economic power, a moral crisis has permeated the society. It appears that a great number of Chinese individuals no longer take morality seriously, but are only interested in monetary wealth to satisfy their immediate, hedo
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A Confucian Notion of the Common Good for Contemporary China Ruiping Fan
10.1
The Moral Crisis in Current China
While China has become a worldly economic power, a moral crisis has permeated the society. It appears that a great number of Chinese individuals no longer take morality seriously, but are only interested in monetary wealth to satisfy their immediate, hedonistic desires and impulses. Even an outsider is easily acquainted with numerous reports of widespread instances of corruption on the part of Chinese officials, businessmen, and even ordinary residents. In short, while China has accomplished a worldly economic success, it has also encountered a grave moral crisis. The first feature of this moral crisis is the gradual breach and fragmentation of Confucian tradition in the twentieth century. While Confucian tradition has been dominant in Chinese society for thousands of years, it has been substantially damaged and distorted by a series of radical Chinese revolutions and Communist political movements, including the Republican Revolution (1911), the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Communist Revolution (1949), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The superstructures of Chinese politics and economics have ceased to be Confucian since the early twentieth century, and an officially promoted morality has been communist since 1949. However, Confucian morality still governs a wide range of contemporary Chinese life (as will be indicated in the later sections of this essay), and a substantive “Confucian personality” has continuously informed the social base of Chinese culture and morality and significantly accounted for the motivation behind and strategies adopted for the success of Chinese economic reforms in the recent three decades. Noticeably, as the reforms have gone further in the recent years, there has been an increasingly remarkable disconnection between the officially announced communist morality and the actually operating, although
R. Fan (*) Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR e-mail: [email protected] D. Solomon and P.C. Lo (eds.), The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives, Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 23, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4_10, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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damaged and even fragmented, Confucian morality.1 This disconnection has constituted the second major feature of the Chinese moral crisis and has been accompanied with various defense mechanisms developed as a response to the announced communist morality. In the first place, many individuals attempt to dissociate themselves from any public moral discourse since it often belies real economic circumstances in recent economic reforms and markets. They do whatever they think necessary, without bothering to talk about morality. Nevertheless, their behavior is still, consciously or unconsciously, regulated by at least a portion of the Confucian moral concerns and commitments. Another part of the people echoes the ann
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