Chinese Morality

On November 6, the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. hosted an event, “The Chinese discourse on moral decay in the PRC,” which examined the “rise of money worship, rampant official corruption, and the ongoing and painstaking search for modern virtues in an ancient civilization.”

Professor He Huaihong of Peking University commented that while riding a bus recently, young people were giving up their seats for him, and he wondered to himself:

What if it were an elderly person that had fallen on the ground, would these young people pick that elderly person up after a fall? Because everyone knows that in China today, a lot of people don’t dare do that … some of them what they do is they fake an injury, and then they try to extort out of the person who picks them, and then ends up taking them to the hospital. So, we always keep asking ourselves, have the elderly become bad, or have the bad guys just gotten old?

This is a reference to cases such as that of Peng Yu, a 26-year-old man who in 2007 saw a 65-year-old woman fall to the ground as he was getting off a bus. He rushed over to help her and she then accused him of having knocked her down. She sued him for over $20,000. The Gulou District Court in Nanjing ordered Peng Yu to pay 40 percent of the claim, or about $8,000.

Many Chinese took this lesson to heart. In 2011, a 2-year-old girl was run over twice by vehicles, and footage shows that 18 people walked past her without helping – she subsequently died. According to a survey conducted by China Youth Daily, 76.3 percent of those polled said they understood why the passersby didn't help the dying child.

During the discussion in Washington, Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, said “China lost its Middle Kingdom with the end of the Ming Dynasty, lost its Han ethnicity with the conquest by the Qing Dynasty, lost its face with the Cultural Revolution, and then lost its morality with economic reform.”

“Currently we do have quite a serious problem with morality in our society in China now,” replied He. “And basically the issues are that we lack basic trust, and we lack kindness.”

In the 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, psychologist Jonathan Haidt popularized the moral foundations theory, which examines cultural variations in moral reasoning according to six foundations: caring for others, fairness according to shared rules, liberty, loyalty to one’s group, respect for tradition and authority, and the abhorrence of things disgusting or impure. For instance, Haidt points out that in the United States, liberals tend to focus exclusively on caring for others, fairness, and liberty.

So how does China measure up?

We already know China is experiencing problems in terms of caring for others, and in fact according to the 2015 World Giving Index, China is less charitable than any other nation in the world except Burundi. China doesn’t measure up well in terms of fairness or corruption either, as evidenced by the 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index, which gives China an abysmal score of 36 out of a possible 100.

In terms of liberty, one hardly need comment. Nevertheless, consider that the 2015 Freedom of the Press Index gives China a rating of 86 (in this case, the lowest possible score was 100). Even Russia scored better, with a rating of 83, and the difference between China’s score and North Korea’s (97) is actually less than the difference between Norway and Austria.

Next we turn to respect for tradition and authority, classic Confucian virtues that are still given immeasurable weight in Chinese society today. This may seem benign, if not entirely positive, but according to social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, specifically the power distance index, the more members of society revere tradition and authority, the more willingly they accept social inequality. Conversely, the less they accept social inequality, the more likely they are to challenge authority. And, as it happens, China has one of the highest power distance index scores in the world.

In his closing remarks, He commented:

I believe that humans need to spend more time thinking about what’s long-lasting, and less time just trying to speed up. Perhaps in this context, I can call on everyone to see if we can appreciate the lightness and slow rhythm of ancient Chinese wisdom.

But if we can in fact draw a line from the great emphasis Confucianism places on authority to the inequality we see in modern Chinese society, then perhaps we should be more precise when paying lip service to “ancient Chinese wisdom.”

The last of Haidt’s six foundations is disgust, but it isn’t clear that this is really a good measure of one’s moral foundations. For instance, a 2011 study, “Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations,” found that “people who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations.”

In other words, conservatives are more sensitive to disgusting things, and the cause for this lies partly in physiological structures, calling into question just how rational this process is, and to what extent morality is a factor at all.

Research has also shown a neuronal basis for empathy. Thus, instead of moral evaluations of Chinese behavior with regards to empathy, perhaps it would be more productive to focus on opening paths of greater discourse and understanding – although this is perhaps an issue more relevant to free speech than to etiquette.