“The Moral Child”: Anthropological Perspectives on Moral Development in China

Abstract

Children's moral development has assumed an important and evolving role in Chinese culture, for its significance in various Chinese philosophical thoughts (Hsiung 2005; Cline 2015), its connection to educational desire and political governance (Bakken 2000; Kipnis 2011), its centrality in the project of nationalistic modernization throughout waves of national movements in early modern China (Jones 2011), socialist period (Tillman 2018) and post-reform era (Anagnost 1997; Fong 2004). While the emphasis of moral development has a long history in Chinese culture, today's China witnesses intense debates around the moral life of young children as anxieties over the society's moral transformations and the ramifications of family-planning policies with China's rise to global superpower (Xu 2017). Grounded in the anthropological literature that offers wholistic theoretical insights through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter will also draw from relevant works in other disciplines, for example, historical research on Chinese childhood and cultural psychology of Chinese moral socialization, to provide a comprehensive understanding of “the moral child” in Chinese culture. The first section aims to introduce historical roots of the Chinese views of moral development; the second section, the main focus of the chapter, aims to review anthropological research and debates on Chinese moral development; the third section aims to delineate important open questions for anthropologists, such as broadening research scope by studying and comparing different segments of populations, deepening theoretical and methodological conversations with cognitive scientists to join in larger theoretical debates, and analyzing the complex interactions between moral development and other aspects of children's life, i.e., gender socialization. Taken together, this chapter will make a unique contribution to bridging the humanistic perspectives and the cognitive/evolutionary perspectives on Chinese morality.