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This article introduces the special issue on ethics of sharing by way of a conceptual discussion of four key terms that animate the individual contributions: sharing, ethics, situation, and presence. Turning to situational analysis to hold fast the anthropological empirical commitment, each author takes as their point of departure a detailed description of empirical sharing situations. The aim is to bring this ethnographic attention to specific situations into conversation with recent anthropological debates on ethics that resonate with the growing interest and emerging literature on sharing. In a concluding reflection on the individual contributions, the article grapples with the problem of scale and makes efforts to relate the ethics of sharing to our present human condition as cohabitants of the shared environmental life-support system of one finite planet, Earth. It is this planetary horizon, we find, that adds a new urgency to the perennial ethical question of how one ought to live: what can this shared existential situation be said to demand of us?

The widespread phenomenon of unsafe food on the Chinese market has been argued to be both symptomatic of moral disregard for the well-being of strangers and productive of social distrust. Organic farming has grown in recent years in response to this situation, and this article discusses the ethical work of farmers based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at one such farm in northern China. While the Community Supported Agriculture model of the farm is shown to hinge upon establishing personal trust with member households, turning strangers into associates, the entire project of organic farming is shown to be undergirded by strong expressions of solidarity with conventional farmers framed in the language of moral economy. Engaging with theories of relational morality, the article proposes instead an extended concept of moral economies that allows us to capture the coexistence of differential care alongside horizontal solidarities within the moral landscape of contemporary China. (JCCA/GIGA)

This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite university students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the struggle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness (浮躁, fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students' inhabiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the temporal experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article enquires into the temporality of the present human condition. (JCCA/GIGA)

Introduction to Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 3/2015: Going Out: The Lives of Chinese Students (JCCA/GIGA)

As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China