Modern China yearns for new moral code

Every day thousands of Chinese tourists make their way to the Lingyin Buddhist Temple in the mountains outside Hangzhou. When they reach the Great Hall of Clouds and Forests, home to a giant statue of Buddha, they light bundles of incense and bow their heads, proffering flaming sticks to the heavens. But many, especially the young and well dressed, seem unsure about how such rituals should be conducted. They look around, copying what others are doing.

One shouldn’t read too much into the modest religious experiments of tourists out on a Sunday stroll. Yet the fumbling for the spiritual of the visitors to Lingyin is symbolic of a nation that craves something beyond the material development that has been served up as the raison d’être of China’s modern existence.

The debate about morality bubbles constantly beneath China’s increasingly sleek, modern surface. It came into view again last month when millions of Chinese watched in horror the video of passers-by ignoring the plight of a young girl who had been run over by a delivery van. The footage of two-year-old Yueyue showed no fewer than 18 people walk or drive past even after the girl, by this time bleeding profusely, had been hit by a second vehicle in what proved a fatal blow.

The incident provoked a cyber-torrent of introspection. Both the driver of the first vehicle and the 18 passers-by were verbally lacerated. One blogger wrote: “As the economy moves forward, morality retreats.” Even Wang Yang, the Communist party secretary of Guangdong province, where the incident took place, implored citizens to “use the knife of conscience to dissect the ugliness in themselves”.

Some commentators have sought an explanation for the incident in Chinese culture, citing ancient proverbs to suggest that people have always looked out for themselves. One such saying, quoted in an article by Lijia Zhang, a former Nanjing missile-assembly worker turned author, goes: “Each person should sweep the snow from his own doorstep and should not fret about the frost on his neighbour’s roof.” Ms Zhang concludes that Chinese culture has “a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers”.

One should be wary of such generalisations. China is not alone in containing people hardened to the plight of others. The streets of Mumbai or London are just as likely to witness acts of selfish self-preservation. The interest is less in the tragic incident itself and more in the reaction of the Chinese, many of whom seem to be yearning for some kind of clearer moral value system.

Poor incentives, rather than a supposedly immutable culture, are likely to explain much behaviour. In the case of Yueyue, passers-by may well have been influenced by perverse court decisions that have punished people for trying to help. Those who have gone to another’s aid have sometimes been sued by the victim for allegedly causing the accident in the first place.

There is now a push for a “duty of rescue” law that would punish onlookers who do not go to a stranger’s aid. But beyond the specifics of the Yueyue case, the incentives at work in modern China are not designed to foster the best in people. Traditional codes, embodied by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, were deliberately dismantled under Mao Zedong who, at least in theory, tried to replace them with the communitarian values of socialism. Now that too has gone. The façade of communism has given way to a raw kind of capitalism in which wealth and power accrue to the bold and selfish.

Since Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms in 1978, generalised poverty has given way to increasingly large pockets of sometimes extravagant wealth. For the lucky, good fortune has been created in a matter of decades. The paradox of China is that money is now the indubitable coinage of success. But there is hardly a Chinese person alive who does not regard the accumulation of money and power with suspicion.

That explains the outrage over another traffic accident last year in which the son of a security bureau official ran over two roller-skaters, killing one. When arrested, he is purported to have shouted: “Sue me. My father is Li Gang.” That phrase has become a byword for the sense of impunity that stalks modern China and threatens the legitimacy of the Communist party. The belief that power and money are above the law lies at the heart of several recent scandals, from milk-powder poisoning to corruption surrounding high-speed rail construction.

Day to day, most Chinese people are able to put aside the broader moral confusion to perform the little acts of kindness and decency that make a society function. But tragic moral lapses, like the one that led to the death of Yueyue, remind people of the bigger moral vacuum. Deng himself was not oblivious to this. Although he is said to have told his fellow Chinese that “to get rich is glorious”, he was also a regular pilgrim to the Lingyin Temple.

david.pilling@ft.com