Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. xiii, 231 pp. (Illustrations.) US$27.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-9926-3.
This book examines school and parental strategies for raising moral children, as well as the children’s reactions to these efforts. The children attend a preschool in central Shanghai and are mostly upper-middle-class Shanghai residents of Han ethnicity between the ages of two and five. Jing Xu combines the disciplinary approaches of sociocultural anthropology and developmental psychology. She integrates literature from both disciplines, uses ethnographic research methods as well as surveys and psychological experiments, and makes arguments about how the cultural and social environment of China and Shanghai influence moral educational efforts as well as the cognitive development of young children in general.
Jing Xu spent a year at the preschool (from August 2011 to July 2012), enrolling her own son as the youngest student there and spending her days interacting with teachers, children, and other parents. She conducted a survey of 92 of the families with a child at the preschool (77 percent of the families with a child there) and carried out various experiments with the children themselves, documenting how they reacted to different scenarios of distributing rewards and sharing toys, candies, or cake. Perhaps because I am an anthropologist, I found the arguments about how the social and cultural situations of Shanghai parents affected children more interesting than the more general points about child development.
Because of how the birth control policy was implemented in Shanghai, almost all of the children at the preschool were singletons and many of the parents were singletons as well. Most families lived in three generational households, with grandparents helping with childcare as both parents worked. Many of the parents worried that their children were spoiled, and that they needed to learn how to cooperate with other children, how to fit into a group, and how to obey the rules of a wider society. The school also begins from this premise, as teachers place much emphasis on making children fit in to collective routines at the beginning of the year. Particular attention is paid to eating, as teachers fear that many of the children are still spoon-fed by doting grandparents. They require children to finish their food themselves, without speaking and without refusing any of the items on their plate.
Another concern regards the wider society. Shanghai and China in general are seen by parents as extremely competitive and corrupt places. Everyone is fighting to get ahead and this results in bribery, corner cutting, and disregarding those who seem to be of low status. The education sector itself is a centre of this competition and corruption, with bribes going to teachers and principals to get children into the right schools and classes and to have them receive preferential treatment. Teachers are thought to treat low-status students whose parents give meagre gifts poorly and preschool teachers (who generally do not have Shanghai household registrations) are sometimes treated as lower-class subjects by upper-middle-class parents. Moreover, even without the corrupting influences of bribery and snobbery, a strict focus on academic competition interferes with the teaching of morality and the cultivation of empathy for others.
Jing Xu has both good news and bad news for parents concerned with raising moral children in such an environment as well as an interesting finding for developmental psychologists. On the one hand, the children demonstrate both empathy with people who suffer and a grasp of moral principles about who should have preference to what sorts of property and when, and how to share. On the other hand, some of the children also demonstrate a shrewd awareness about how to manipulate forms of sharing, gift giving, and reciprocity to their own strategic advantage. Even some three-year-olds know that one should cozy up to the boss, give gifts to those with power, and act one way in front of social superiors and another way with inferiors. Attributing such behaviours to a wider environment in which the cultivation of connections with the powerful is important, Xu cautions developmental psychologists against seeing the sharing behaviour of young children as simply a universal stage of moral development. It is neither strictly universal nor a simple matter of morality.
Xu also pays considerable attention to Chinese concepts related to moral development and child raising like guanjiao 管教 (discipline, training) and zuoren 做人 (acting as a [moral] person). She argues that while guanjiao may involve strict forms of parenting, including corporal punishment and various forms of shaming and exclusion, it should not simply be equated to the “authoritarian parenting” depicted in the Western literature on child development. It also involves an extensive amount of care and attention paid to children and is a concept that opens up considerable space for debate. Exactly how to guanjiao children is a matter of dispute within many families. Zuoren likewise is a concept that opens up space for reflection. How to act morally in a given situation is often a complex question.
In all this is a well-written and careful piece of work. I hope it is taken seriously by developmental psychologists. For China specialists, it adds to a growing literature on education and child-raising. My only caveat would be that caution is needed when thinking about how this study of upper-middle-class parenting in Shanghai relates to the concerns and actions of differentially positioned parents in other parts of China.
Andrew B. Kipnis
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China