In the last two decades, China has become a dramatically more urban society and hundreds of millions of people have changed residence in the process. Family and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as "a society of kith and kin." There has been a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, and the new market economy doesn't seem to offer any solutions. This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this "moral crisis" is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought leaders and scholars, or that it can be simply chalked up to the topsy-turvy of a market economy on steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the perception of crisis is itself symptomatic of a deeper problem that has roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship and the modern state management of stranger sociality. This ambitious work is the first to investigate the figure of the stranger—foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois intellectual, class enemy, unattached woman, animal—across literature, film, television, and museum culture. Lee's aim is to show that hope lies with a robust civil society in which literature and the arts play a key role in sharpening the moral faculties and apprenticing readers in the art of living with strangers. In so doing, she makes a historical, comparative, and theoretically informed contribution to the on-going conversation on China's "(un)civil society."

"China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window-dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. The rule of law seems an elusive ideal in the face of entrenched obstacles baked, as it were, into China's cultural and political DNA. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from an ahistorical understanding of China's political-legal tradition, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice. Lee argues that the liberal (and, so to speak, horizontal) conception of justice as fairness is quite different from the Chinese understanding of law. In the Chinese legal imagination, she shows, justice is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. China's political-legal culture mistrusts law's ability to deliver justice and privileges moral over procedural justice. Lee shows that Chinese literature and film invariably dramatize the relationship between law and morality in ways that emphasize law's concession to moral sentiments and the triumph of moral justice through the discretion of a sagacious judge or the defiance of a vigilante hero. As China rises to global superpower status, its conception of justice can no longer be treated as a pale, floundering, and negligible sideshow to the legal drama of defending liberty and upholding human rights in the West. Lee's book helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and in terms other than those furnished by the rule of law"--

Churches are traditionally among the first to respond to the call to aid strangers in distress. In this age of globalization, one group of strangers in particular—asylum seekers and refugees—is in urgent need of welcome as they flee their homelands in search of safety. This same group, however, faces hostility and rejection in many places. What should be the church’s response? This book argues that Christian hospitality offers a powerful theological and pastoral response to such vulnerable strangers in our midst. For that to happen, the church must answer two questions: “What is Christian hospitality?” and “How do we put it into practice with refugees and asylum seekers?” Part One answers the first question with a cross-disciplinary study of sacred hospitality in both ancient and modern times. Part Two tackles the second with a fascinating case study of the church’s outreach to refugees and asylum seekers in an international Chinese city. As communities worldwide receive refugees and asylum seekers, this book offers Christian hospitality and the Hong Kong experience as one hopeful response to needy strangers at our doorstep. It is a welcome theological and practical resource for refugee ministry in the twenty-first century.

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

A pioneering cultural history of smell in China from the High Qing to the Mao period.

This ground-breaking handbook provides multi-disciplinary insight into Chinese morality, cognition and emotion by collecting in one place a comprehensive collection of essays focused on Chinese morality by world-leading experts from more than a dozen different academic fields of study. Through fifteen substantive chapters, readers are offered a holistic look into the ways morality could be interpreted in China, and a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including ecological, anthropological and cultural neuroscience. Offering a syncretic, multi-disciplinary overview that moves beyond the usual western-oriented perspective of China as a monolithic culture, research questions addressed in this book focus on morality as represented at the level of the individual, rather than at the group or institutional levels. Research questions explored herein include: What are the major contours of distinctively Chinese morality? What was the role of the ancient ecology, climate, and pathogen load in producing Chinese moral attitudes and emotions? Are ingredients of the good life in China different than ingredients of the good life elsewhere? How are children in China morally educated? How do findings from cultural neuroscience help us understand differences in the treatment of family members, or the treatment of strangers, in China and elsewhere? How do the protests in Hong Kong participate in, or stand apart from, the ongoing ethics of protest in historical China? The clear structure and accessible writing offer a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality can be interpreted, shedding light on differences between China and Western cultures. The book also provides a timely window into Chinese forms of morality, and the pivotal role these play in social organization, family relationships, systems of government, emotion and cognition. Representing fields of study ranging from philosophy, linguistics, archaeology, history, and religion, to social psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and behavioral ecology, this is an essential text for students, academics, and others with wide interest in Chinese culture.

In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as thieves of grain) and the felines with whom they are perennially at war is explored in this presentation of Chinese tales about cats and mice. Master translator Wilt Idema situates them in an overview of animal tales in world literature, in the Chinese literary tradition as a whole, and within Chinese imaginative depictions of animals. The tales demonstrate the animals’ symbolism and their unusually prominent—and verbal—role in the stories. These readings depict cats and mice in conflict, in marital bonds, and in litigation—most centrally in a legal case of a mouse against a cat in the underworld court of King Yama. Many of the stories adopt the perspective of the mice as animals merely trying to survive, while also recognizing that cats are natural hunters. This entertaining volume will appeal to readers interested in Chinese literature and society, comparative literature, and posthumanist consideration of human-animal relations.