Book review: communities of complicity: everyday ethics in rural China by Hans Steinmüller

Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty, in which ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism, and the Chinese tradition. Hans Steinmüller’s ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba, in Hubei Province, central China, is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. This should be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese rural change, local politics and culture, as well as to anthropologists of “ordinary ethics” beyond China Studies, writes Charlotte Goodburn.