Parenting, Education, and Social Mobility in Rural China: Cultivating Dragons and Phoenixes, by Peggy A. Kong. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. xvii+131 pp. £90.00 (cloth).

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Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsParenting, Education, and Social Mobility in Rural China: Cultivating Dragons and Phoenixes, by Peggy A. Kong. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. xvii+131 pp. £90.00 (cloth).Mette Halskov HansenMette Halskov HansenUniversity of Oslo Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA growing body of literature approaches schooling in China from an ethnographic point of view, focusing on issues such as why the desire for education is so strong in Chinese society (explored in a book by Andrew Kipnis) or how vocational education serves an important purpose in creating class differences (examined in a new book by T. E. Woronov). In Parenting, Education, and Social Mobility in Rural China, Peggy A. Kong contributes new ethnographic perspectives on how rural parents consciously seek to improve their children’s chances of upward social mobility by means of education. Based mainly on interviews and observations within 15 families in a rural area of Gansu Province between 2003 and 2005, Kong explores how parents themselves present their engagement in their children’s education and how this compares to dominant stereotypes describing rural parents in general as being less involved in their children’s education than urban parents.Though the fieldwork was carried out more than 10 years ago, the most important findings are still valid today. Based on interviews, Kong shows how parents who only have a few years of education and make a living mainly as farmers try to facilitate their disadvantaged children’s schooling. These parents express a high degree of uncertainty in the face of teachers’ and schools’ inherent social authority, but they nevertheless experiment with concrete strategies to achieve their ambition to support their children’s social mobility. As Kong shows, they take extra jobs to be able to afford their children’s education, exempt their children from household chores to give them more time for homework, draw on kinship networks to get information about schooling, and are even prepared to migrate if it will help get their children into better schools. Other parental strategies in rural areas of China, such as sending children to boarding school or to live in a teacher’s home, prioritizing one child’s education while letting siblings drop out earlier, or bringing offers to temples or consulting fortune tellers are not mentioned in Kong’s study, perhaps because they were not prevalent in her research locale. All these various strategies make up what Kong defines as “invisible” forms of parent involvement. They are invisible, Kong points out, to teachers, China’s education authorities, and even scholars.While these forms of parental engagement are generally ignored among educational authorities and in the national discourse, I am not convinced that they are “invisible” to teachers. Due to precisely the kind of social reproduction that is strengthened by the household registration system (hukou), also described in the book, many (perhaps even most) primary school teachers in the poorer rural areas of China are themselves from a rural background. They often share an experience of being the first high school or university graduate in their family or even in their village. They are therefore familiar with how rural parents struggle to improve their children’s education in the hope of achieving job security and social mobility, as their own parents had employed some of the same strategies. However, as Kong rightly points out, these parental strategies are ignored or considered irrelevant by rural teachers when discussing parent-school relations and parents’ presumed lack of engagement in their children’s education. Kong concludes with a number of relevant concrete recommendations on how to improve parent-teacher relations and gain acknowledgment of the efforts these rural parents put into their children’s future.Kong displays an empathetic approach to her informants. She is loyal to their depictions of what it means to be a disadvantaged parent who trusts that education equals upward mobility, to the point that she ends the book with the statement, “Like the ‘Old Man Moves a Mountain,’ slowly and with each generation, rural parents are moving forward and up the social ladder” (122).The book has weak aspects. Kong engages with only a limited part of the existing academic literature on rural Chinese society and education. And the publisher, Routledge, should have done a better job by deleting repetitions, correcting typos, and improving the language.Nevertheless, the book should be of interest to students and scholars studying rural education in China. A Chinese version would be useful for teachers and educational authorities working to improve rural education in China. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 77January 2017 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689254 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.