With her acute observation and nuanced analysis of moral discourse and practice in a rural community, Ellen Oxfeld has made an original and important contribution to the fast-growing literature on contemporary China as well as to the anthropology of morality. Her findings are frequently refreshing, sometimes inspiring and, overall, reassuring as they convince the reader that, despite all the recent scares of moral crisis or decay, there is still a well-maintained moral order and a set of moral principles that enable the residents of a Hakka village in south-east China to make sense of their lives and others'.

The book is divided into two sections. Part one offers a brief review of the existing literature on moral changes in post-Mao China, lays out the basic categories and theoretical tools that Oxfeld employs to scrutinize her ethnographic data, and introduces her longitudinal fieldwork. All of these are skilfully done and quite helpful in orienting the reader. The highlight of part one, however, is her discovery of an important notion in Chinese culture, namely, liangxin which has been painstakingly translated in English as “conscience.” I would like to equate the importance of Oxfeld's effort to unpack the rich meanings of liangxin with the extensive studies on guanxi and renqing in the 1980s and 1990s. Liangxin indeed features centrally in both moral discourse and practice among the Chinese people across all walks of life and all over the world, as is the role of memory in moral reasoning which is another important finding by Oxfeld. It is to the credit of Oxfeld that she rescues the notion from obscurity in social science studies of China and teases out quite nicely several layers of its rich meanings.

The rest of the book grows even more interesting and thought-provoking as the author tells one story after another about how liangxin is practised, delineated and contested in everyday life in the village of Moonshadow Pond. Part two consists of five chapters of vivid and thick ethnography that deal with, respectively, the changing patterns of family relations, the continuity and change in funeral practice, the cultural meanings and social impact of home coming for both the returning overseas Chinese and their relatives at the home village, the thorny issue of property rights that epitomizes how the local tradition has been turned upside down by first collectivization and then decollectivization, and finally, the question of wealth at the levels of everyday social practice and ethical reflections.

In each of these chapters, Oxfeld does a superb job in analysing the moral discourse as an embedded part of social practice, presenting contending voices and claims through the actions of flesh-and-bone individuals, making comparative notes with other scholarly work or ethnographies from elsewhere, engaging theoretical dialogue with a range of scholars here and there, and placing local stories in the context of the existing literature in not only anthropology but a number of other disciplines including sociology, history, linguistics and moral philosophy. While doing all of these, Oxfeld has also introduced about two dozens individual villagers to the reader in such an effective way that, by the time I finished the book, I could remember most of them and could even imagine the appearance and body language of some individuals. This is the power of ethnography!

This does not mean, however, that I agree with every point that Oxfeld makes in the book; on the contrary, in quite a number of places, I would see things differently. Chief among them is the author's assessment that, as the emphases of memory and obligation still bind villagers together and make them care of one another, the fear of moral crisis or decay in China that we often hear from both scholars and ordinary people might be out of proportion, if not entirely mistaken. Moral discourse, argues Oxfeld, is often generated from moral breaches, which in turn shows that people do care about moral principles. True. But, the same kind of moral reasoning within a local community may not be able to contain the growth of moral breaches in society at large. Instead, some new and previously unthinkable moral breaches kept rising and challenging the base lines of morality, such as the extortion of the Good Samaritan by the very person who has just been helped (see Yunxiang Yan, “The Good Samaritan's new trouble: a study of the changing moral landscape in contemporary China,” Social Anthropology, 2009, 17 (1), pp. 9–24). Why is liangxin not working in this context? This is because that the Good Samaritan helped a stranger in a highly mobile and public setting (mostly on an urban street) where the two parties are unlikely to interact again. The kind of liangxin and the associated moral reasoning that Oxfeld documented so well in the book does not apply to strangers – they are designed to work for acquaintances only. Therefore, I would argue that the public fear of moral decay in society at large is well grounded and actually co-exists with the well-maintained moral order in a given local community. The moral order among strangers in an open and mobile social setting is based on quite a different set of ethical notions and moral norms, which have yet to be fully established in Chinese society. This leads to another question: will a stronger sense of moral bonding among acquaintances possibly have negative impact on one's behaviour toward a total stranger?

In short, this is a well-written and inspiring book that is bound to be a popular choice in classroom teaching and a contemporary classic in China studies. In addition, it also raises a set of challenging questions, urging more scholars to explore the changing moral landscape in contemporary Chinese society. Two thumbs up!