In our increasingly interdependent world, none of us can deny that open dialogue across cultures, based on mutual understanding, is of the first importance. And “mutual understanding” does not mean grasping a few platitudes about supposedly invariant cultures: it means being able to see and make sense of the dynamic tensions within our respective societies. An excellent way to get at these complexities is to read the works of local intellectuals as they strive to make sense of and to critique their own societies, as well as to argue for distinctive perspectives on global issues. We should thus be very grateful for the Thornton Center Chinese Thinker Series which, like the Princeton-China Series, presents Anglophone readers with translations of representative writings by leading Chinese intellectuals. The latest volume in the series collects 19 essays by the ethicist and social critic He Huaihong, together with an outstanding introductory essay by Cheng Li. The translation is excellent and He's insights and arguments deserve a broad audience – an audience not just of people who want to understand contemporary China, but also of those who want to engage with and learn from it.

The essays are divided into six sections, and although they span a wide range of topics, both He's thought and the book as a whole exhibit a real coherence. Part one includes two essays, one from 2012 and one from 1994, both of which aim to construct a new framework for contemporary Chinese ethics. This is really to begin with He's solution to the challenges he will go on to document, but putting his ethical theory first makes excellent sense, as it orients readers toward what is at stake in the subsequent essays. I will return to the contents of his theorizing below. Part two presents in some detail He's description of the structure of imperial Chinese society as a “selection society,” which I found to be a valuable theoretical elaboration on standard historical accounts. Part three turns to the first several decades of the People's Republic, looking both at the “manipulated rebellion” of the Red Guards and the “demobilized morality” of the post-Mao period. Part four probes the “moral crisis” of contemporary Chinese society at a relatively theoretical level, while Part five includes six essays on concrete ethical issues in contemporary China, such as corruption, the death penalty (which He opposes) and the environment. Part six, finally, is explicitly about dialogue with the rest of the world. He engages with Bernard Williams about the limits of moral philosophy, with John Rawls about the nature of justice, and reflects on the possibilities for some sort of global moral consensus.

Running throughout the essays is a consistent theme: China's people need to rediscover the “distilled,” bedrock moral principles on which their traditional ethics were based, and then work to articulate a new social ethics that starts from these principles but is suited to a modern world characterized by a basic commitment to equality. In other words, he believes that there is something universal and correct at the core of traditional Confucianism, but because of the enormous changes wrought by modernity, a new ethics will look quite different from the old one. For one thing, it will have a more explicit two-part structure than did the old ethics: it will have a core, “minimal morality” applying necessarily to all people, and more culturally relative “value-based beliefs” that describe the higher reaches of moral possibility. He also insists over and over again that the protection of life, of bare survival, must be at the foundation of all morality. This does resonate in certain ways with Confucianism, though the “ceaseless production and reproduction of life” that is central to Neo-Confucianism (among other traditional philosophies) is a richer notion than bare survival. He's focus on survival has much to do with what he calls the repeated “savagery” to which many in China (and around the world, though he has less to say about this) sank at points in the 20th century.

The subtitle of He's book is “Moral Decay or Ethical Awakening?” Worries about a contemporary Chinese “moral miasma” can be found in many chapters, but it is clear that He is working toward a more positive outcome. In contrast with the “mobilized” morality of the Cultural Revolution, He speaks hopefully about the current “demobilized” morality as peaceful, popular and civilian. There is room now for a proper morality, rather than having morality swallowed up by politics. Still, in He's view China is at best in early stages of an “ethical awakening.” This is not about learning from the West, or at least not primarily so: he does see similar challenges posed by modernity around the world, and it would be surprising if the various nations of the world had nothing to learn from one another's experiences. But Western theorists are not infallible. Chinese theorists can critically engage with them and appropriate what makes best sense, as in He's encounter with Williams and Rawls in this book, and other Western thinkers in some of his other works. At the same time, Western philosophers and social critics can learn from He's project, so admirably presented in this volume. We all have a long way to go.