Table Of ContentTHE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK OF MORALITY,
COGNITION, AND EMOTION IN
CHINA
This ground-breaking handbook provides multi-disciplinary insight into Chinese morality, cognition,
and emotion by collecting in one place a comprehensive set of essays focused on Chinese morality by
world-leading experts from more than a dozen different academic fields of study.
Through fifteen substantive chapters, readers are offered a holistic look into the ways
morality could be interpreted in China, and a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including
ecological, anthropological, and cultural neuroscientific. Offering a syncretic, multi-disciplinary
overview that moves beyond the usual western-oriented perspective of China as a monolithic
culture, research questions addressed in this book focus on morality as represented at the level of
the individual rather than at the group or institutional levels. Research questions explored
herein include: What are the major contours of distinctively Chinese morality? What was the
role of ancient ecology, climate, and pathogen load in producing Chinese moral attitudes and
emotions? Are ingredients of the good life in China different than ingredients of the good life
elsewhere? How are children in China morally educated? How do findings from cultural
neuroscience help us understand differences in the treatment of family members, or the
treatment of strangers, in China and elsewhere? How do the protests in Hong Kong participate
in, or stand apart from, the ongoing ethics of protest in historical China? The clear structure and
accessible writing offer a rigorous assessment of the ways in which morality can be interpreted,
shedding light on differences between China and Western cultures. The book also provides a
timely window into Chinese forms of morality, and the pivotal role these play in social
organization, family relationships, systems of government, emotion, and cognition.
Representing fields of study ranging from philosophy, linguistics, archeology, history, and
religion, to social psychology, neuroscience, clinical psychology, developmental psychology,
and behavioral ecology, this is an essential text for students, academics, and others with a wide
interest in Chinese culture.
Ryan Nichols is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He studies
China, cultural evolution, and the cultural evolution of China and Chinese thought.
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THE ROUTLEDGE
INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK OF
MORALITY, COGNITION,
AND EMOTION IN CHINA
Edited by Ryan Nichols
© Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ryan Nichols; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Ryan Nichols to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Nichols, Ryan, editor.
Title: The Routledge international handbook of morality, cognition, and emotion in
China / edited by Ryan Nichols.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021053580 (print) | LCCN 2021053581 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032114163 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003281566 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cognitive science‐‐China. | Social psychology‐‐China. | Ethics‐‐China.
| Cultural pluralism‐‐Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC BF311 .R668 2022 (print) | LCC BF311 (ebook) | DDC
302.0951‐‐dc23/eng/20220126
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053580
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053581
ISBN: 978-1-032-11416-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-31651-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28156-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003281566
Typeset in Bembo
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments viii
Contributors xii
Introduction 1
Ryan Nichols
PART I
Models 17
1 The Cultural Evolution of Chinese Morality, and the Essential Value
of Multi-disciplinary Research in Understanding It 19
Ryan Nichols
2 Doing Right and Not Doing Wrong: A Social Psychological Model
for the Situated Morality of the Chinese and Other Cultural Groups 38
Michael H. Bond
PART II
Distal and Subpersonal Factors 59
3 An Ecological Analysis of Chinese Morality: Latitude, Pathogens,
Agriculture and Modernization 61
Takeshi Hamamura
4 Genetic Contributions to East Asian Morality 80
Yiyi Wang and Yanjie Su
v
Contents
5 Cultural Neuroscience Perspectives on Moral Judgment with a Focus
on East Asia 101
Shihui Han
PART III
Cultural and Historical Factors 117
6 Cognitive Science and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics: In Defense of
Habit 119
Edward Slingerland
7 Language and Morality in Chinese Culture 135
Perry Link
8 Chinese Moral Psychology as Framed by China’s Legal Tradition:
Historical Illustrations of How the Friction between Formal and
Informal Species of Law Defines the “Legal Soul” of China 148
John Head
PART IV
Developmental and Psychological Factors 173
9 Understanding Morality in China from a Perspective of
Developmental Psychology 175
Liqi Zhu and Yingjia Wan
10 “The Moral Child”: Anthropological Perspectives on Moral
Development in China 193
Jing Xu
11 Cultural Psychology and The Meaning of Morality in Chinese and
China: Misconceptions, Conceptions, and Possibilities 215
Emma E. Buchtel
PART V
Factors of Moral Change 237
12 Trajectories of Moral Transformation in Contemporary China 239
Yunxiang Yan
13 Well-being and Morality in Chinese Culture 257
Vivian Miu-Chi Lun
vi
Contents
14 Protest and Chinese Morality: A Hong Kong Case Study 270
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
15 Understanding the Cultural Diversity of Chinese Morality 289
Yiming Jing and Huajian Cai
Index 303
vii
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The last of the copy-edited English-language versions of the commissioned articles for this
volume was submitted to translators yesterday. This makes today, coincidentally, May 35, 2021,
and the day I begin to introduce this book to its potential readers. This has required me to shake
off what is not ‘writer’s block’ so much as a low-grade form of cognitive and emotional
paralysis. Amidst the bright-shining luminaries who are represented as contributors to this
volume, many at the pinnacle of their respective areas of research, who am I to introduce this
topic or, indeed, edit a volume such as this?
My journey to understand China began when my mother Carol Nichols, teaching English as
a second language at a nearby community college, invited Zhang Weijun 张伟俊, then her
student, now a notable business consultant in Shanghai, to our home for dinner in 1987. After
studying the Chinese language later in college, I spent a summer at Tunghai University 東海大
學 attempting to solidify my language skills. During graduate school, I was unable to actively
continue the study of Chinese thought while I focused on Western philosophy, but after
landing an academic job, I turned my attention back to understanding China and have
continued down this path since. From 2017–2020 I held an Academic Cross-Training
fellowship given me by the John Templeton Foundation. In my proposal for that project I
pledged to use the funding to take time away from teaching, pay for tuition costs so as to allow
me to return to university, and take a number of classes across the curriculum, all in order to
help me better understand Chinese culture and morality. Including those in which I was
formally enrolled and those in which I was not, the list encompassed courses in the archeology
of bronze-age China, behavioral endocrinology, cultural genomics, social learning in humans
and non-human primates, anthropology of contemporary China, human social organization,
and contemporary Chinese literature, and more. I took most of these courses at UCLA. Prior to
matriculating there, I spent a year and a half in the classroom at my home institution where,
literally in some cases, I found myself in classes seated next to my own former students. At Cal
State Fullerton I enrolled in a long sequence of methods and statistics courses.
A separate project, and one that led to this book, took shape roughly simultaneously with my
Academic Cross-Training experience. I was gaining qualifications to bring together a cross-
disciplinary group of China experts in productive, evidence-based conversation. “To learn and
then to have occasion to practice what you have learned—is this not satisfying?” (Analects 1.1;
Slingerland 2003, 1). Though I still did not feel qualified to lead a group of world-leading
viii
Preface and Acknowledgments
academic researchers in an interdisciplinary quest to understand Chinese morality, it appeared to
me that someone needed to make an effort to draw such a group together. This was because it
appeared that few researchers were sufficiently aware of relevant research in neighboring, let
alone distant, fields of study. The result was a situation in which experts seemed to be rushing
through high-traffic, interdisciplinary crossroads. I envisioned this as a rural crossroads in my
hometown, an Illinois village with about 2500 residents just off old Route 66. There is still not
one stoplight, quintessential ‘flyover’ country in America’s Midwest. Motorists travel through.
Some tap the breaks. Others roll through the stop sign. Some drivers don’t let up on the gas.
Few but locals exit their cars. There I sat, at my tea and coffee shop at the crossroads. Finally,
after my time on the Academic Cross-Training fellowship, I was competent to invite in some
guests and make friends.
In 2017 and 2018 I began writing to potential collaborators on this project to not only invite
them but to show them that their voices were needed in any interdisciplinary project about
Chinese morality. During this period I eventually lined up a core group and decided to embark
on grant writing for support. I thank each of the authors in this book, each of whom are
collaborators in this project, for their participation, and for their faith in what must have seemed
to be a quixotic project of a junior academic. Most especially, I’m indebted to Drs. Michael
Bond and Perry Link, who mentored me in ways small and large.
In June 2018 the original contract for the grant that made this project possible was signed.
Our generous funder has been the Templeton World Charities Foundation (grant
TWCF0257). This foundation was also founded by Sir John Templeton but it’s mission is
distinct from the John Templeton Foundation. This project and this volume would not have
been possible without the vision of and belief in this project shown by leaders at Templeton
World Charities Foundation including Andrew Serazin and David Potgieter; without the
efforts of its financial officers, including Sandra Darville, Tina Cambridge, and Melinda
Cartwright, who assisted me in re-budgeting a complex grant and helped me work through
COVID-related challenges; and most certainly not without the guidance of Bonnie Zahl, the
Templeton World Charities Foundation program officer who has advised this project from
inception on. I repeatedly drew on her insights, theoretical and practical, over the last several
years and I hope to continue to do so.
Setting up a tea and coffee shop, let alone a profitable one, is no easy task. Many others merit
my thanks in this process, including Edward (Ted) Slingerland and Justin Barrett. Back in 2010,
Ted took a chance on me by giving me a postdoctoral fellowship, a place in his Cultural
Evolution of Religion Research Consortium, and a seat at the table at the Centre for Human
Evolution, Cognition, and Culture and its laboratory. My intellectual growth and
interdisciplinary research skills accelerated rapidly during time at the University of British
Columbia. Through my participation in research there, I was able to build relationships with
outstanding researchers across the world, not least longtime collaborator Kristoffer Nielbo. To
Ted, I owe thanks for expanding my world, helping me acquire the research skills I needed to
ask questions that mattered, introducing me to people who could help me do so, and the
confidence to push forward.
Justin Barrett’s consistent and long-term faith in my seemingly chaotic, unruly, omnivorous,
multi-method research about China has meant the world to me. Professionally, Justin has
volunteered to serve as my informal and, sometimes, formal mentor. On many an occasion I
have grabbed his hand in a boyish excitement to explore some new hypothesis, to criticize some
new experiment, or to reflect on far-fetched causal relations of one kind or another only to
find, once we arrived, he had been there before. Justin has selflessly shared with me his
knowledge, his experience, his connections, and has been for me an academic role model on
ix
