Raising Chinese Singletons: Anxieties and Struggles of Parenting in Contemporary China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores parental hope, anxiety, and grief in raising China’s singleton generation. Childrearing in China deeply intertwines with the country’s national development, population control and aspiration for modernity. Chinese parents are documented to have invested excessive love, financial resources, and care to their singleton children (Anagnost 1995, 1997; Fong 2002, 2004), but are also found to constantly struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with strong cultural legacy and limited resources (Kuan 2015; Naftali 2013, 2010, 2009). Parenting has become an important site of inquiry into China’s changing social reality.

This panel investigates emerging challenges that Chinese parents with varied socio-economic backgrounds are facing in different stages of the family cycle from an anthropological perspective. How would parents cope with the moral education of young children in the context of a perceived moral crisis in China? What challenges do parents encounter when adolescents and young adults come together on the Internet, accusing their parents of being “poisonous” and calling on a parenting revolution? How and why would urban parents negotiate matchmaking for their adult children in the marriage market? And what would happen when parents lose their one and only child and are faced with an old age without support from their children? Examining the anxieties and struggles that Chinese parents encounter today, the four papers jointly reveal the varied meanings of Chinese parenting and contribute to understanding how China’s rapid social transformations are expressed in the most intimate of human relationships.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizers

• Jing Xu, University of Washington

• Xia Zhang, Portland State University

Chair

• Xia Zhang, Portland State University

Individual Presentations

• Aspirations and Anxieties: Cultivating Morality in Young Singleton Children in China - Jing Xu, University of Washington

• When Singleton Children Fight Back: Filial Piety, Social Media and Anti-Parent Sentiments in China - Xia Zhang, Portland State University

• The Paradox of Love: Parental Matchmaking under China’s One-Child Policy - Chen Chen, University of Chicago

• Losing the One and Only Child: Shidu and the Vulnerability of China’s One-Child Families - Lihong Shi, Case Western Reserve University

Discussant

• Ann Anagnost, University of Washington