Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. xiii, 255 pp. US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28350-3.
This book provides insights into the dilemmas of middle-class parenting in China, in a way that can also be generalized to other countries. It provides a scholarly yet eminently readable antidote to the thrills that global readers took from the tiger mother popular debates about whether children benefit from ambitious, autocratic parenting. The book unpacks what it means to balance the tensions between nurturing children to follow their own individuality, while preparing them for the competitive social and economic environment they face in China and in other populous countries.
The book builds from thorough ethnographic work in Kunming, the middle-sized capital city of Yunnan in southwest China. The chapters include engaging stories and illustrations from the research. The introduction starts by explaining the biopolitical (agency and governmentality) theoretical framework and anthropological methodology adopted in the research. The remainder of the book is also well referenced across the disciplines, in theories of parenting, childhood, education, identity, and human capital topics relevant to the subject. It concentrates on parents’ choices about education in its widest sense as the focus of parenting and child development.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of suzhi—improving human quality. It argues that Chinese parents try to balance the scientific engineering of childhood against the agency and subjectivity of the child by engaging in the first in order to maximize opportunities for the second. Yet agency is disrupted or abandoned due to pressure to achieve, and conform by scoring well in examinations to enter good schools and universities.
Chapter 2 analyzes stories of good and bad parenting to illustrate the suzhi tension, noting the subjectivity of both the child and the parent and nurturing the potential of the child. Chapter 3 follows with an examination of the gendered aspects of the emotional work of parenting, including the conflict of different pressures and the irreconcilable contradiction of expectations to manage the internal wellbeing of children with the external competitive context.
Chapter 4 introduces the second Chinese concept explored in the book, tiaojian—the conditions in which children can flourish. Chinese parents’ explain that their focus on tiaojian is because it is the responsibility of parents to maximize tiaojian from which the child can take advantage. Even if parents disagree with the pressure on children, they invest in tiaojian to avoid regret. As well as investing in tiaojian, they also attempt to change tiaojian if it is bad, such as removing bad friends, avoiding child and parent behaviour that will provoke teachers to negatively label or discriminate against their child and avoiding risk by keeping a low profile so the teacher does not notice the child.
Chapter 5 analyzes the popular reaction to a television soap opera about three young women cousins, their mothers, and the godmother-like grandmother. The research is based on Internet discussions and the author’s ethnographic work, about how the young women’s autonomy and self-actualization conflict with the mothers’ efforts to establish tiaojian for “potential born of effort.” Popular sympathy rests with the young women, undermining the mothers’ recognition of how effort is needed to address the competitive world and the importance of status in their children’s lives.
Chapter 6 takes two contrasting examples of understanding child development as human capital. Teacher Wang, a popular parenting commentator, has the notion that a child’s human capital is a resource to build and invest in like material capital. Mr Deng, an engineer and father, views human capital as a limited entity like a natural resource, which needs to be conserved because it can be used up and a child or young person can burn out early if pushed too hard. Yet both Wang and Deng understand that, when competing for limited opportunities, the human capital of children needs investment, which requires parents to make consumption choices in education, to determine how they spend their time and money. Chapter 7 follows a similar theme about “banking in affects” or emotions, which claims that parents must invest in opportunities for children to accumulate and reflect on their emotional experiences. The author participates in an expensive children’s trip to Beijing that goes awry but is aimed at this investment.
The book concludes with a reflection on the contrast between the author’s own Californian childhood and the Cultural Revolution childhoods of today’s Chinese parents. Her sympathetic conclusion is that parents are not following their own ambitions or investing in their own future, but are trying to do their best by preparing their children to be able to make choices in the China of today. The book will appeal to people who are familiar with China as well as those who are not, because it includes sufficient explanation and detail for both, and resonates with parenting choices in any middle- and high-income country. The quirks of today’s China told in the stories add further interest to the analysis of this common dilemma.
Karen R. Fisher
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
pp. 882-884