Conclusion

This book began with a short account describing the alarm and dismay felt by a Chinese educator at the sight of a woman beating her child in public. The denunciation of this mother’s actions over the pages of a CCP news publication, I suggested, indicates a pivotal shift in Chinese conceptions of childhood, power, and subjectivity in the post-socialist era. Rather than appendages to their families, to society, or the nation, as has been the case for much of Chinese history, children in China are now increasingly recast in the role of “small subjects,” worthy of rights and respect. Exploring the origins and dynamics of this shift, this book has argued that it is a product not only of the changing value of urban youngsters in the era of economic reforms and the One-Child Policy, but also, and no less significantly, of the increasing influence of a modern, liberal discourse on children’s rights in post-1989, urban China.