Xu Ming, a 26-year-old man in China's Hebei province, raped at least 37 women between the ages of 71 and 93. Older women were "easier to control", he told police.
Yang Xinhai, China's worst serial killer to date, murdered 65 people and raped 23 women. In the southern city of Shenzhen, a couple killed 17 young job seekers, while a student in Henan murdered 17 students -- "for fun".
In Beijing, a taxi driver and his wife killed seven people, including four prostitutes whose bodies they chopped into pieces and partially ate. In Nanjing, a snack-shop owner grew worried about competition. He put rat poison in a rival's products, killing 38 people. A further 300 fell ill.
These incidents may point to a moral crisis in Chinese or they may not. Perhaps they are nothing new or special -- China does not have a monopoly on rapists or serial killers; far from it. What is new is the ability of the Chinese press, including Internet outlets, to report such gruesome tales. For my part, I believe China has been facing a moral crisis, but I also see signs of new hope.
Concerns about a decline in morality have long been common in China. The country's greatest modern writer, Lu Xun, wrote in 1918: "'The world is going to the dogs. Men are growing more degenerate every day. The country is faced with ruin!' -- such laments have been heard in China since time immemorial."
Many would say that Lu Xun's generation of Western-influenced reformers were themselves responsible for a decline in morality because of their attacks on traditional Chinese culture.
Modernists like Lu Xun believed that abandoning the past would help create a new, dynamic Chinese civilisation capable of catching up with the West. Communism arose from this movement and took its iconoclastic spirit further.
The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was only a more extreme example of the same theme: temples were destroyed, books burned, old values such as filial piety rejected in favour of a new revolutionary moral code that encouraged children to denounce their parents.
Communism did have its own moral values -- frugality, solidarity, egalitarianism -- and many Chinese look back at the Mao period as an era that exemplified them. In doing so, they forget a parallel reality of starvation and gulags.
The country's leaders, Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui, has recounted, were not always scrupulous in adhering to these values. After 1978, market reforms ensured that materialism would become the only official ideology. After all, Deng Xiaoping said, it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
Communal restrictions on behaviour also disappeared as population mobility increased in the 1990s. Intimate communities police themselves. But China has become a drastically more urban society in the last two decades, and hundreds of millions of people have moved residence in the process.
This shift has accelerated in the last few years as the government's controls on the registration of people, a system known as hukou, have been eased.
For these reasons, some scholars have called morality China's core problem. Tradition has been destroyed. The new market economy doesn't offer normative answers. Not many Chinese would like to admit it, but Taiwan today may be a better example of a Chinese civilisation than China itself.
But by focusing on China's moral crisis, overseas observers make a mistake. They separate the subject of their study from the rest of the world, as if China is different, as if outsiders are somehow better anchored in morality than Chinese who live, disoriented, in a "moral vacuum".
This is rubbish, as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Parmalat have demonstrated. Yes, the Cultural Revolution was a very specific and dramatic phenomenon that makes China unique, but Chinese face some of the same moral issues we all face.
In Western countries, organic communities have long disappeared and been replaced by fragmented, atomistic societies. Secularisation is part and parcel of modernisation.
As we look at China, therefore, it's important to remember the magnitude of social and economic changes. This is not a justification of poor morals, but humanity is especially put to the test amid radical changes, such as those China is now experiencing.
Once upon a time, China was a poor very country; many of its regions still are. An economy of scarcity tends to be zero-sum: people fight for the few resources available. Absent an exogenous influence such as religion, individuals lack the inclination to develop shared resources or capabilities above and beyond the fulfilment of their most basic needs.
The cost of creating a common social infrastructure is too high, and there are always free riders waiting in the wings. Without a motivating factor for the creation of this common social infrastructure, the result is what game theorists call the tragedy of the commons. Selfish and predatory behaviour is prevalent. Self-fulfilment may take the form of extreme behaviour -- including, I suppose, killing people "for fun".
What is required of a society at this stage is a departure from zero-sum: the start of cooperation, collaboration, generosity, investment without immediate return: let's work together to save the commons and make it available to all.
Let's create arrangements -- property rights -- that ensure proper usage, allowing each community member access to the commons. Some degree of prosperity is arguably necessary for this new attitude to take root.
Take home ownership: if you own an apartment, you begin to care about the state of the hallways, staircase, and elevator in your building. If you don't own the apartment, why care? Public transport also changes people's notions of self-esteem and consequently their behaviour toward others.
Riding a bicycle in the rain makes you wear a certain type of clothing -- shabby clothing, and you feel and behave accordingly. Taking an air-conditioned bus or subway to work makes you upgrade your wardrobe -- and your sense of self. Now think of this: there are 86 subway lines in construction or in preparation in China. Most urban Chinese today own their housing.
As more people lead better lives, this new condition is bound to impact their moral behaviour. More secure in their livelihood and freedoms, Chinese are now focusing on their families, on their friends. They are picking up hobbies. They read more. They are supporting charities.
Putting it another way, a people may have a pre-existing moral system, founded upon religious or secular values. If such a system, for whatever reason, doesn't exist, it needs to be constructed. Fragments of the past are rediscovered and sown together, new elements added. This is currently the case in China. The hope is that prosperity will provide the environment for a new moral system. It seems to me likely that a better material life will lead to a better moral life.
To be sure, signs of dark behaviour still exist in everyday life: cruelty, violence, discrimination. As China emerged from Communism in the 1980s and 1990s, a certain extremism remained and it may yet increase rather than disappear.
In some sense, this extremism was bred by the very extremity of the country's history, by its dramatic ups and downs over the past century. These changes gave rise to opportunities for corruption and excess. Human nature being what it is, some took advantage of these opportunities.
Now China is becoming a more mellow place and some degree of order -- equilibrium -- appears to be emerging, newspaper headlines notwithstanding. This new China is important not only for those who live there, but for the world, as well. A China anchored in morality is better for us all.
matei_mihalca@hotmail.com
Powered by 