China’s Moral Crisis

Wang Yu, China’s most prominent human rights lawyer, has been awarded the Ludovic Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, also known as the Ludovic Trarieux Award, which honors lawyers who defend human rights. The award was established by Bertrand Favreau in 1984 and first awarded to Nelson Mandela. The first Chinese to receive the award was Zhou Guoqiang in 1998. Zhou had been arrested multiple times and put through re-education. His wife and two friends were also arrested, all without a trial or any legal proceedings.

Wang Yu, too, has been arrested and charged with subversion. She is guilty of defending peaceful academics, women who raise awareness about sexual assault and sexually abused children. Her career limns the passion of a woman devoted to the helpless victims of Chinese society. She is the embodiment of ren, that noble Confucian virtue once defined by the master himself as “loving others.”

But according to Beijing, this is subversive, and she has been arrested and may spend the rest of her natural life imprisoned for defending China’s victims. And who are China’s victims? Almost everyone, really. Women, children, the elderly, minorities, the LGBT community, the disabled, and animals. Not only are these groups abused, tortured, and killed, they’re denied legal recourse.

The Feminist Five handed out fliers to raise awareness about sexual assault and were incarcerated. Tang Hui, whose 10-year-old daughter was gang raped and sold into prostitution, was thrown into a labor camp after seeking justice for her child.

Like Vietnam or North Korea, China resembles a police state whose civil authorities exert severe punishment for crimes against the state, whatever they may be. Its exertion of power isn’t arbitrary. It’s clearly to maintain the status quo.

And so the lack of habeas corpus, warrantless searches and arrests, and general lack of freedom are all intended to safeguard the Communist Party against the collective power of the people. Ironically, these very elements are eroding Beijing’s power, as they’ve created a system whereby Chinese are implicitly encouraged, if not openly incentivized, to seek out extrajudicial solutions to their problems.

In July 2013 two men got into an argument with a woman about a parking space. The woman wouldn’t move, so one of the men pulled her 2-year-old toddler out of its pram and slammed her on the ground, killing her. Then there’s the phenomenon of Chinese drivers intentionally killing pedestrians. Or the emergence of insurance for good Samaritans in order to protect them from lawsuits brought by those they helped.

There are notable exceptions. Tom Phillips of The Telegraph writes about one Chinese restaurateur in Fuzhou who bucks against the trend of China’s “moral crisis” by allowing customers to pay only if they choose to do so. The man, Liu Pengfei, said he opened his restaurant, “Good One,” to help restore a sense of trust among Chinese. According to Phillips, “Mr. Liu said his idea was to build trust by offering diners the choice of doing the correct thing -- paying -- or taking the dishonest path of leaving without settling the bill.”

But this may be precisely the kind of behavior that’s creating the problem in the first place. China needs firm but gentle pressure in the direction of conformity to societal rules of behavior, not more leniency when people choose to behave selfishly. In China, police do not uniformly hold the public to a fair set of laws. Enforcement is spotty, corruption is deep, the wealthy can fork over bribes or pay people who look like them to serve their sentences, and all this contributes to a sense of injustice that promotes further problems.

Why obey a set of rules when those rules don’t work for you and when getting around them is so easy? In order to develop a sense of moral character in any society, one must be consistent, firm, and caring. Beijing is none of these things to the Chinese people.

As a result, the debate about China’s “moral crisis” continues, and China remains a place often so caught up in its own existential struggle that compassion is abandoned and even policed. So it should be no surprise that modern China is a place where people like Wang Yu are punished, or where an American can become a hero after giving a homeless Chinese woman some French fries.

In Korea: The Politics of the Vortex, Gregory Henderson describes “the existence of a vortex pattern of political concentration” in Korean society that creates an updraft, pulling everything in society toward the top: the government, that “great vortex summoning men rapidly into it, placing them briefly near the summit of ambition, and then sweeping them out.”

This could also be said of China, except that the Communist Party is the vortex. In Korea, Henderson writes, this creates “hostility toward authority.” In China, it creates hostility toward society, manifesting itself in widespread disregard for etiquette and rampant corruption. China’s greatest resource is its people, but until Beijing celebrates the citizens who defend those people, this resource will remain as much as threat as an asset.

To quote the philosopher Mencius:

“Only a gentleman can maintain a constant heart without constant means. For the common people, if they have no constant means of support, they cannot sustain their hearts’ resolve. Without the constant resolve of the heart, they will slip into excesses and deviant behavior, stopping at nothing. Now to allow them to fall into criminal ways in this manner and only then to punish them is to entrap the people. Whenever has there been a man of humanity in authority who set traps for people?”