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Morality and life of the spirit in China today are widely, and quite correctly, viewed as being in a state of crisis. This perception finds support even at the highest level of the Chinese leadership, which one would have thought would normally be the last to own up to such a crisis given its delegitimating implications. Although this moral crisis is only one constituent of life in China today, it casts an ever-darkening shadow over almost everything else and suffuses all things otherwise good and worth celebrating with its corrosive atmosphere of an unspeakable wrongness of the whole.

Thus, any adequate understanding of China today, whatever one’s perspective or interest, requires an effort to make sense of its moral crisis. To assess the achievements and costs of the three decades of economic and social reform, it is necessary to reckon with this moral crisis. Likewise, to make any informed conjecture about what shape China is likely to take in the foreseeable future and how this shape might impinge on the world at large, it is necessary to grasp the inner workings of this crisis.