Modernization often involves changes in behaviour norms, values, and moral reasoning; China is by no means an exception. The present study focuses on a rare type of extreme immoral cases in which the Good Samaritan is extorted by the very person being helped. A particular effort is made to unpack why most extortionists of the Good Samaritan are elderly people. Despite its rare occurrence, cases of extorting Good Samaritans have seriously negative impacts on social trust, compassion, and the principle of reciprocity. Yet, a close analysis of the cases and public opinions reveals the complexity of the seemingly straight immoral behaviour, especially the tension between two moral systems and the challenge of dealing with strangers, which in turn reflect the changing moral landscape in contemporary Chinese society.

Ecological engineering on the Sichuan frontier

Socialism as development policy, local practice, and contested ideology1

John Flower

China's Western Development Policy redefines the Sichuan frontier as backward economic hinterland, and as ecological buffer zone for the coast. State planners see the ‘farmland to forest’ plan and hydropower development as achieving socialist modernisation through ecological engineering. Local people like the reforestation plan that maintains subsistence on the land, but they protest land expropriation that accompanies dam construction. In negotiating the terms of this new national integration, protesters draw on both historical memory and a new discourse of human rights and the rule of law to assert ‘popular socialism’ against state brokerage of the commons under market socialism.

Of farming chemicals and cancer deaths

The politics of health in contemporary rural China*

Anna Lora‐Wainwright

Where do Chinese villagers lay the blame when they develop cancer? The focus falls on the state when the supposed cause is water pollution; on the family context when it is hard work; and on the market when farm chemicals contaminate food. These different cancer aetiologies define the contours of a biological citizenship which does not only operate in relation to the state or premised on ‘scientific’ or biomedical evidence, but also on the basis of competing parameters of wellbeing and welfare drawing on personal and social experiences of work and eating. With data from fieldwork in rural Sichuan, this article illustrates that disputes about cancer causality and attitudes towards farm chemicals are also ways to voice villagers' ambivalent attitudes towards modernisation, consumerism, and development as contending forms of morality.

Creating ethical food consumers? Promoting organic foods in urban Southwest China1

Jakob Klein

The article discusses recent attempts by an environmental NGO to promote the consumption of organic foods among residents in Kunming, Southwest China. Far from being elitist, activists engaged with popular environmental culture and with widespread concerns around health and food safety, and echoed advertisers' messages that associated the ‘healthfulness’ of organic foods with ‘nature’. The article also discusses two private organic food enterprises. Like the NGO, these enterprises attempted to both engage with popular concerns and educate consumers, and it is argued that the study of environmentalism and ethical consumption in urban China should include both NGOs and profit‐oriented enterprises.

The comparative sociology of India and China

Peter Van Der Veer

India and China as spiritual nations

A comparative anthropology of histories

Stephan Feuchtwang

The production of rulers

Communist party schools and the transition to neo‐socialism in contemporary China1

Frank Pieke

The Chinese state's functioning continues to revolve around the communist party. Control over the management of cadres gives the party the ultimate power across the institutions of formal governance. Here the party's control is interrogated by scrutinizing the efforts to upgrade cadre training at party schools in order to modernize the practice and ethos of administration. Cadres should also become modern, competent managers of increasingly complex organizations. Nevertheless, the article shows that the main mission of training remains Leninist ‘unification of thought’ (). Study or training at the party school also is a valuable opportunity to socialize with people from other areas as much as one's own area. Cadre training is an experiential realization of cadres' belonging to the party or state apparatus. It makes cadres feel they are special, and the relationships formed during training are an important lubricant of the administrative system.

Anthropology of China's frontier: From the periphery to the centre

EILEEN ROSE WALSH

Social Anthropology

Anthropologie sociale

Volume 17 Issue 1

by Abélès, Marc  by Eriksen, Thomas Hylland

by Johnson, Ericka

by Konstantinov, Yulian by Vladimirova, Vladislava

edited by Kreinath, Jens, Snoek, Jan and Stausberg, Michael  edited by Kreinath, Jens, Snoek, Jan and Stausberg, Michael

by Leutloff‐Grandits, Carolin

edited by Monterescu, Daniel, and Dan Rabinowitz

by Schneider, Arnd

by Smith, Andrea L.

by Thiessen, Ilká

by Velasco Maíllo, Honorio M., Angel Díaz de Rada

by West, Harry G.

by Argenti, Nicolas

by Willerslev, Rane

by Brubaker, Rogers

by Carrier, Neil

by Clelland‐Stokes, Sacha

edited by Ellen, Roy

by Fechter, Anne‐Meike

by Fernandes, Sujatha

edited by Field, Les and Richard G. Fox

Introduction

A Chinese century in anthropology?

The Good Samaritan's new trouble

A study of the changing moral landscape in contemporary China1