Social suffering and the culture of compassion in a morally divided China

Abstract

This collection of essays opens a critical examination of compassionate acts responding to social suffering in the intensely complex moral context of a rapidly changing and globalizing China. Jeanne Shea describes self-compassion among older women in China as a post-revolutionary response to changing opportunities and resistance to consumerism. Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce's essay frames the Buddhist organizations as NGOs and shows compassion being mobilized and its acts being spiritual-philanthropic, not political. The next three papers illuminate the complexity of mobility in a moral sea of changing values. Even as modernity facilitates movement of people away from suffering, the grinding of entangled moral experiences within the mobile group can be the cause of suffering. Shu-Min Huang critiques ‘cultural petrification’ as the diasporic Yunnan Chinese community in Thailand attempt to preserve the cultural forms and procedures of the world they left behind. Likewise, Richard Madsen shows that the idea of a universalized cultural heritage fails in the face of the ‘micro-ecologies’. And yet the modern impulse to universalize beyond China has important implications for transnational compassion and cooperation. The work of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières in China, discussed by Kuah-Pearce and Guiheux, challenges the universality of global humanitarian actions. Following the series of essays threaded across intersections of compassion, suffering, and a morally-divided China, the collection closes by looking at the West. Iain Wilkinson discusses the origins of social suffering as a focus of the social sciences, as well as the difficulties of making engaged compassion its task in a morally-divided world.