The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Haiyan Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Haiyan Lee Carlos Rojas The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Haiyan Lee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 362. $50.00 cloth, $50.00 e-book. In this extraordinary study, Haiyan Lee begins by referencing a series of incidents in contemporary China where passersby have callously declined to help a stranger in distress. Perhaps most notably, there was an infamous incident in Guangdong in 2011, which was caught on video, when a two-year-old girl named Wang Yue 王悅 ("Yueyue 悅悅") was accidentally run over by not one but two vehicles. She lay screaming in agony in the middle of the public road for more than seven minutes as at least eighteen pedestrians walked right by her without stopping to offer assistance (eventually, a lowly rubbish collector attempted to get her medical attention, but the child died shortly afterward). Part of the reason why so many people in contemporary China are disinclined to help someone they do not know is because there have been an equally [End Page 253] well-publicized series of cases in which Good Samaritans have been successfully sued by the very people they had been trying to help—on the logic that the person offering assistance must have somehow been complicit in the original injury, otherwise why would they have stopped to help in the first place? This growing reluctance to assist strangers in need has been widely cited, in both the domestic and the international press, as symptomatic of a pervasive moral crisis in contemporary China. Haiyan Lee engages this ongoing discussion by comparing this contemporary phenomenon to the so-called Lei Feng spirit (Lei Feng jingshen 雷锋精神) that was promoted during the Maoist 1960s. Named after a PLA soldier who died in his early twenties and was posthumously lionized for his selfless devotion to the Party and his community, the Lei Feng spirit would appear, at first glance, to represent the very antithesis of the callous selfishness that leads contemporary bystanders to refuse to assist their injured compatriots. Lee, however, argues instead that it is precisely this advocacy of Lei Feng spirit (and all that it represents) that helped make the contemporary selfish behavior possible in the first place. In particular, she contends that the putative altruism embodied by the Lei Feng spirit does not represent a genuine moral gesture, since the legendary Lei Feng is explicitly presented as acting on behalf of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party rather than out of a sense of true moral conviction. Lee argues that the result is a systematic deferral of moral judgment from the individual to the external figure of the Party, which in turn actively inhibits the development of an autonomous moral agency. In this respect, she argues, the Maoist celebration of Lei Feng's putative selflessness contributed directly to the sort of moral myopia that we find in contemporary phenomena such as the Wang Yue incident. In The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, Lee sketches a set of overlapping genealogies of discourses of the stranger in modern Chinese literature and culture. Her main focus is on the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, though some of her examples extend further back into the late imperial period and even the classical era. Her approach is guided by a body of moral philosophy developed by figures such as Emmanuel Levinas, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hannah Arendt, among others, but she also draws deftly on other theories and methodologies ranging from sociology to poststructuralism. The result is a [End Page 254] lively and compelling set of analyses that engage closely with a wide variety of literary and cultural works, while consistently foregrounding a set of moral concerns with wide-reaching implications. Lee's study is divided into three parts, centered around themes of "alien kind," "fictive kin," and "friends and foes." Each part consists of a pair of chapters looking at issues involving spirits and animals, female outsiders and internal migration, and class difference and foreign visitors, respectively. Each chapter, in turn, is structured around a set of close analyses of a handful of texts, intermixed with a broader range of cultural, historical...