An enormous challenge facing China is how to provide sustainable care for its rapidly-increasing elderly population. Its recent policy directives include three medical forms—the institution-cooperation-form, the institution-medical-form, and the family-physician-form—to integrate medical care into ordinary care for the elderly. This essay indicates that China will not be able to maintain sustainable elderly care unless it places emphasis on the family-physician-form that focuses on family physicians and the use of primary care services. The essay constructs arguments for this policy suggestion based (...) on China’s long-standing Confucian ethical resources of filial piety and family-based concerns for elderly care. (shrink)

Rudyard Kipling famously penned, “East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” His poetic line suggests that Eastern and Western cultures are irreconcilably different and that their members engage in fundamentally incommensurable ethical practices. This paper argues that differing cultures do not necessarily operate by incommensurable moral principles. On the contrary, if we adopt a virtue ethics perspective, we discover that East and West are always meeting because their virtues share a natural basis and structure. This (...) article sketches the rudiments of what a universal virtue ethic might look like. Such an ethic is especially relevant and valuable in this era of global business. (shrink)