Social Ethics in a Changing China

Over the past half-century, China has experienced incredible human dramas, ranging from Red Guard fanaticism and the loss of education for an entire generation during the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen tragedy, the economic miracle, and its accompanying money worship and rampant official corruption. Social Ethics in a Changing China: Moral Decay or Ethical Awakening? provides a rich empirical narrative and thought-provoking scholarly arguments that highlight the imperative for an ethical discourse in a country increasingly seen by many as a materialistic giant and spiritual dwarf.Professor He Huaihong has been not only an extraordinary witness to all of these dramas, but has also played a distinct role as a historian, an ethicist, and a social critic exploring the deeper intellectual and sociological origins of these events.Incorporating ethical theories with his expertise in the culture, history, religion, literature, and politics of the country, He reviews the remarkable transformation of ethics and morality in the People's Republic of China and engages in a global discourse about the major ethical issues of our time. He's book aims to reconstruct Chinese social ethics in an innovative philosophical framework, reflecting China's search for new virtues.The analysis of social ethics in today's China presented by Professor He in this volume is formidable. It is natural to wonder if the new ethics he proposes is powerful enough to uproot and supplant the old. ”-from the Foreword by John L. ThorntonWhile this volume focuses on the intellectual odyssey of one truly extraordinary Chinese ethicist, it is also about the broader experience of China's journey into the twenty-first century-about the country's painful attempt to recover from its severemoral decay.”-from the Introduction by Cheng Li