It is commonplace in China to hear that, since the Reform era, the society faces a moral vacuum, that cynicism reigns, and all that counts is the pursuit of wealth and power. I have heard many ordinary people make this argument, and it is echoed by distinguished social critics like He Qinglian as well as by philosophers like Ci Jiwei and anthropologists like Yan Yunxiang. But the criticisms themselves imply common moral standards, even if honored only in the breach. It is an important, though often neglected, task for social scientists to discover what these standards really are and what are the conditions that might enable people to be as good as they think they should be. Ellen Oxfeld's new book is a very valuable contribution to this undertaking.
The book is about how ordinary people in a particular village evaluate one another's everyday actions. The village is “Moonshadow Pond,” a single-surname Hakka village of about 800 residents in Mei County, Guangdong. The ethnography spanned over 15 years. Oxfeld became deeply integrated into this community and she describes the place and its people with empathy and nuance. Absent any contribution to theories of morality, the book would still be a great addition to the ethnography of rural China.
But the focus of the ethnography is moral discourse, which is explicated from the stories that villagers tell about themselves, their families, and their neighbors and also from the rituals they perform, the gossip they spread, and even the lies they tell. All of this symbolic performance is analyzed with the help of many contemporary theories, from Bakhtin to Bourdieu, Dumont, Giddens, and so on down the alphabet. But the book wears its theory lightly and keeps our attention focused on the human stories of the villagers.
Borrowing from Bakhtin, Oxfeld tells us that morality is “dialogic.” It is not based in a fixed system of “values,” but in a common language for arguing about what the values should be. The villagers constantly argue about what is right or wrong in this or that circumstance. They don't often come to agreement and their judgments lack consistency, even when they are trying to justify their own behavior. But they still use common terms to carry on their arguments. The most important of these, according to Oxfeld, is liangxin, literally a “good heart/mind,” but expressing many layers of meaning that can't be easily captured in a simple English translation. To have liangxin is to be able to remember what particular people (especially your parents) have done for you in the past, so that you will know what you owe them now and will be committed to fulfilling your debts in the future. This is captured in the popular saying that is the title for this book: “drink water but remember the source.”
The traditional language of liangxin has been overlain with modern moral languages, such as Mao-era socialist collectivism, and all of this subtly changes the meanings of both the old and the new languages. Although Oxfeld thinks that the traditional language of liangxin pre-dominates, China's moral multilingualism complicates present-day moral discourse. Meanwhile, a constantly changing society makes it increasingly difficult to determine morally correct behavior today.
The changes include: new gender roles, out-migration, transformations in property rights, and the increasing power of the market economy. For example, women have new options for education and work that make them potentially more independent. How then are they supposed to reconcile these new possibilities with the expectation that they marry into another family and be subservient to their mothers-in-law? There are no simple ways of resolving these dilemmas, only constant arguments and not a little conflict and anguish about how to reconcile competing responsibilities. Also, as in most Hakka communities, there has been a great deal of out-migration from Moonshadow Pond to overseas in the past century; and now many of the village's young adults migrate to China's industrial zones. Returning migrants bring money into the community, but there is jealously between those who have such migrant connections and those who do not, and concomitant disputes over whether or not some villagers are manipulating their migrant relatives to get money out of them. Moreover, there are disputes over who has rights to property that was once owned collectively. How much should be returned to private use and how much should still be collective property? Finally, like in most other societies, as the importance of money and the market economy rises, villagers are faced with sharper dilemmas about how to draw the boundaries between the pressures of the market on the one hand and responsibilities to family and community on the other.
The moral arguments over these issues are not abstract. Oxfeld gives them flesh and blood by embedding them in the stories of deftly portrayed subjects confronting clearly described problems. The stories recounted here are not especially dramatic. Moonshadow Pond during this period has not had to endure cataclysmic political campaigns. Its internal conflicts seem relatively moderate. There have been no mass movements protesting outrageous official corruption, and even the effects of outmigration seem relatively mild, because many of the villagers find jobs in a nearby township. The village is not a good site to study the extraordinary moral dilemmas arising from extraordinary problems. In Oxfeld's hands, though, it is a good place for discovering the ordinary, yet in its own way eloquent, discourse of common people confronting the quotidian dilemmas of a small community in a changing China.
