ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a contemporary 'traditional' institution of grassroots charity in rural South China: the practice of mobilizing charitable donations of money and other resources to sponsor endeavours aimed at the common good. It approaches local donation contests primarily as a window into the complexities of China's contemporary moral/ethical landscape. The chapter provides an ethnographic qualification of this multilayered and multi-directional transformation, but the main goal of 'micro-historical' exploration is to contribute to theoretical debates in what James Laidlaw called 'anthropology of ethics and freedom'. The new strategies of livelihood have accelerated the monetization of the local economy and have improved the average household income. The moral frictions are probably more visible in contexts like China where people's engagement with history—despite the apparent lack of heterodoxy—has produced a diverse 'memory bank' of schemas of ethical imagination; but such frictions can be found in just about any context.
