Overview

This book examines, in a culturally and contextually sensitive way, the particularity of what it means to be young in post-Mao China undergoing rapid and dramatic transformation by comparing childhood and youth experiences over three generations. The analysis draws on life-history interviews with Beijing young men and women in their last upper secondary year, their parents and their grandparents. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of the various aspects of life pertinent to youth experiences and compares each of these across three generations, treating them as interrelated and mutually affecting processes – childhood, intergenerational relationships, education and future plans, gender and sexuality. By offering both men’s and women’s accounts of their childhood and youth experiences, which for the three generations combined extend over nearly a century, the book sheds useful light on how gender and sexuality have evolved in China. Fengshu Liu concludes that the young generation’s lives feature a ‘maximization desire’, in sharp contrast to the two older generations’ childhood and youth experiences. The book meticulously weaves rich ethnographic details and individual life stories into a larger and unfolding picture of historical, social and cultural trends, while providing critical insight into Chinese modernization and modernity against the backdrop of globalization. It can thus be an enjoyable read also for people beyond the academia interested in China’s social and cultural transformation and its children and youth.

Full Product Details

9781138217201

Table of Contents

Reviews

Many studies have explored the effects of modernization on human experiences in China, but Fengshu Liu's Modernization as Lived Experiences stands out as a particularly insightful exploration of how modernization caused generational change, due to its use of a research methodology designed specifically to zero in on how and why contemporary teenagers, their parents and grandparents differed in their experiences and aspirations during the same life stages of adolescence and youth. Vanessa L. Fong, published in The China Quarterly, 1-2 doi:10.1017/S0305741021000369

""Many studies have explored the effects of modernization on human experiences in China, but Fengshu Liu’s Modernization as Lived Experiences stands out as a particularly insightful exploration of how modernization caused generational change, due to its use of a research methodology designed specifically to zero in on how and why contemporary teenagers, their parents and grandparents differed in their experiences and aspirations during the same life stages of adolescence and youth."" Vanessa L. Fong, published in The China Quarterly, 1-2 doi:10.1017/S0305741021000369 ""Merely flipping through its introduction chapter will make one realize that beneath its deceitfully unexceptional narrative, the book offers a brilliant account of the rapid and dramatic social transformation of post-Mao China through an unusually deep scrutiny of youthhood across three generations.... Fengshu Liu’s new book is a brilliant account of the modernization process as it has been experienced by the Chinese youth of three generations. I also add that Liu experiments a methodologically effective approach to study individual experiences across the generational and gender lines, which can and perhaps should be replicated in future studies."" Yunxiang Yan, publihsed in The Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1111/deve.12299

Author Information

Fengshu Liu is Professor of Education at the University of Oslo. Her research cuts across childhood and youth studies, comparative and international education, and sociology of education (e.g., gender, generation, family and modernization). Her earlier book is titled Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the Self.

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