Abstract

Since the early 1980s, government, academic, and media bodies in China have been attempting to advance so-called “modern,” “scientific,” and “humanistic” approaches to childrearing and education. This thesis traces the production and reception of China's new pedagogical discourses while examining the links between changing notions of childhood, shifting configurations in the idea of the “public” and the “private,” and recent mutations in the relationship between the state and the citizen in China of the reform era (1978-present). Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork among parents and teachers in the city of Shanghai, and on a survey of a wide range of Chinese-language sources, this study argues that a new notion of the child—as an enterprising, autonomous individual with rights—has been emerging in contemporary China. A product of China's increasing openness to the world and its re-integration within the global market economy in the past several decades; of the One-Child family policy; and of ongoing changes in the governing logic of the socialist state, this new vision of the child is nonetheless fraught with tensions and contradictions. Specifically, the thesis finds that while the Chinese government has been promoting a “neo-liberal” conception of the child and the citizen, it is simultaneously advancing authoritarian, collectivist notions of childrearing and education, grounded in both a Confucian ethos and in an attenuated socialist agenda. The study further reveals that in negotiating these new, conflicting requirements, Chinese teachers and parents, whose existing notions of childhood have been shaped by their professional, class, and historical habitus, at times resist and often actively transform this post-Maoist vision of the child, thereby redefining the meaning of childhood, citizenship, and subjectivity in contemporary China.