Abstract
The issue of love and justice has become increasingly an outstanding moral and social problem in contemporary China. The marginalized group of people in the areas of education, job market, and social welfare in China raises various problems of conflict and inequality, which demand justice in those areas. Regarding just settlement for this group, some relevant studies in disciplines such as political science, law and sociology have attended more to institutional, distributive arrangements and economic factors. This chapter aims to understand the moral identity of this marginalized group from Christian theological perspective of love and explore its implications to the problem of social justice in China. Drawing from and attempting to integrate both Reinhold Niebuhr and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s distinctive positions on love and justice, this chapter points out the possibilities and limitations of applying Christian love in its relationship to social justice in Chinese society. It proposes that if justice is embedded into the ideal of love, justice will not become a pure and mechanic political concept, on the one hand, and the ideas of “justice in love” and “love complementing justice” will enrich and enhance the discourse on social justice in the Chinese context on the other.
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Notes
- 1.
United Nations [20].
- 2.
Liang [8].
- 3.
Outka [14].
- 4.
Robertson [19].
- 5.
Niebuhr [13].
- 6.
Ibid., p. 81.
- 7.
Niebuhr [12].
- 8.
Niebuhr [10].
- 9.
Dorrien [4].
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid., xxiii.
- 12.
Niebuhr [12, p. 28].
- 13.
Niebuhr [10].
- 14.
Ibid., p. 108.
- 15.
Ramsey [17].
- 16.
Ibid., p. 94.
- 17.
Lovin [9].
- 18.
Bennett [2].
- 19.
Dorrien [4, xxiii].
- 20.
Wolterstorff [21].
- 21.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 63.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 90.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 26.
Niebuhr [11].
- 27.
Niebuhr [11, pp. 80–81].
- 28.
Rasmussen [18].
- 29.
At this point, I have been aware of the fact of religious diversity in China. In 2014 Pew Research Center produced an index that ranks each country by its level of religious diversity, in which Singapore is listed the first, Taiwan the second, mainland China the ninth, and Hong Kong the tenth. Here we see the Chinese societies has high level of religious diversity and the Asia-Pacific region has the highest level of religious diversity. In more details, in mainland China, the percentage of the followers of major religions is: Christian 5.1%, Muslim 1.8%, Buddhist 18.2%, Folk religion 21.9%, and particularly 52.2% (more than half) identified “unaffiliated.” See Pew Research Centre [15].
- 30.
See Benedict [1].
- 31.
See Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace [16].
- 32.
Ding [3].
- 33.
Zhiping Liang, ‘The Death of a Detained: The Dilemma and Way-out of Identity Politics in Contemporary China’, [Bei Shourong Zhe Zhisi: Dangdai Zhongguo Shenfen Zhengzhi de Kunjing Yu Chulu “被收容者之死: 当代中国身份政治的困境与出路”], in Zhiping Zhang, Social Justice in Transformative Period, p. 188.
- 34.
Goodin [7].
- 35.
Frederking [5].
- 36.
Forrester [6].
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Xie, Z. (2020). How Love Is Possible: A Christian Approach to the Problem of Social Justice in China. In: Xie, Z., Kollontai, P., Kim, S. (eds) Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Social Justice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5081-2_8
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