Selfless Party officials and the Socialist Legacy

Abstract

As China undergoes drastic social and economic restructuring, ensuing moral catastrophes have garnered increasing attention, with the population emerging as desperate economic subjects craving financial security—a departure from the previous socialist welfare system. Ci Jiwei argues that China is confronting a “moral crisis,” that is, “a state of affairs in which large numbers of people fail to comply with more or less acceptable rules of social co-existence and cooperation,” as he sees that the violation of elementary norms has resulted in the production and widespread sale of unsafe food, medicine, and water, for example.¹ These ruthless acts arguably stem from the desire for profit or advancement at the expense of others. Economic subjects at all social levels pursue wealth during socioeconomic restructuring, transgressing moral and sometimes even legal boundaries. This moral disarray resonates with the global moral crisis that sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identifies—a moral crisis in which strangers are seen as threats, attacked, and killed within a space of liquid modernity, a term he coins to describe the globalization processes in which the boundaries of society and culture become more and more permeable.² Both the anxious Chinese government and cultural elites respond to such a moral crisis on the screen but with different representational paradigms that give rise to representational politics—the former attempts to reinvigorate moral values in order to maintain political legitimacy and the latter reflects upon social problems.