Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens

Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens

Abstract:

Children, Rights, and Modernity in China is an ethnographic study of the emergence of a new type of thinking about children and their entitlements in contemporary urban China. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in primary schools and homes in the city of Shanghai, and on diverse evidence from government, academic, media, and pedagogic publications, the book debunks many popular and scholarly stereotypes about the predominance of Confucian ideas of parental authority in China or about the indifference to individual human rights in the political and public culture of the PRC. The author also recognizes the conflicts that exist in Chinese discourses about and practices toward children, as older ideas of filiality, neoliberal ideologies, and the new awareness of children's right to privacy, to expressing their views, and to protection against violence compete and collude in complicated, often contradictory ways.

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/11/2016