I. The Status of Brotherless Daughters, continued

A. Specific effects

1. Education and work
2. Marriage
3. Domestic roles

B. Gap between boys and girls has narrowed, patriarchy less prominent
C. Girls receive resources for education, jobs, and family lives that they desire
D. Pressure to succeed
E. One-Child Policy required citizens to internalize norms about individuals and families

 

II. Middle-class Parenting and Educating for Quality (Kuan)

A. Kuan, "The Horrific and the Exemplary": what are urban, Chinese middle-class parents doing to raise their children, what are they thinking and feeling, how is this debated in the media?
B. "Good student kills mother" story: cautionary tale of mother stifling child's growth
C. Father who educates his deaf daughter (who goes on to graduate school in the US)
D. Stories provide specific lessons by locating symptoms and giving them meaning
E. "That a good student is driven to act cruelly is symptomatic of bad parenting uninformed by expert knowledge and suzhi jiaoyu principles" (1109).

1. One-Child Policy: focus on human capital --> suzhi jiaoyu, or "educating for quality"
2. Suzhi has long been a concern, including after Opium War (1840) raised questions about falling behind West
3. Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour (1992)

a. End of USSR (1991)
b. Tiananmen Square events (1989)
c. Continue market-oriented policies as key to growth
d. Cheap labor economy --> knowledge-centered economy

4. Suzhi (quality) links national development to individual responsibility based on their desires
5. Urban children have suzhi, rural migrants do not (37)

F. Educating for quality versus educating for exams
G. Parents must

1. Nurture children's potential
2. Not be autocratic or controlling
3. Be aware of their own emotions
4. Govern themselves

H. Stories convey lessons about how to do this

 

III. Good Student Kills Mother

A. Xu Li (son) was interviewed
B. Mother stifled him, "killed" him first

1. Controlled relationships with friends
2. Cared only about his studies
3. Forbade him from playing soccer or watching tv
4. Physically threatened him

C. Son stuffs mother's body in suitcase
D. Incongruity: mother's parenting is excessive

1. Blocks him from knowing wider world (no tv, can't talk with friends)
2. Doesn't educate for quality
3. Doesn't attend to son's inner life, his human potential

 

IV. The Father who Appreciates his Child

A. Zhou Hong gives his deaf daughter positive reinforcement: thumbs up versus jabbing forefinger
B. Goal: appreciate one's child
C. Abacus story
D. Father works on himself

1. Mind uncorrupted by competition: being OK
2. Growth is natural
3. Reflect on his own self when child had problems
4. Unstifled child --> self-motivated

E. Kuan: parent works on self so parent's self can understand the child's needs and cultivate the child
F. Mother who is killed lacks self-awareness; mother blame
G. Not laissez-faire, but being vigilant in the right way: "It is through the intensification of both the child's and the parent's subjectivity that national strength and arrival to modernity are to be secured" (1119).

 

V. College-Entrance Exams

A. Causes of anxiety

1. Need to care for elders
2. Educational success is primary driver of upward mobility

B. High-stakes exams: zhongkao (high school), gaokao (university)

1. Too many graduates, too few jobs
2. Parents want children to do well --> tell child what to do

C. How to succeed but be creative? How to compete but not get undone by stress?

 

VI. Affect

A. Chinese notion of person as shaped by environment, so place children in environment that will foster growth
B. People are affected by surroundings and affect those surroundings
C. Baruch Spinoza (17th century Dutch philosopher)

1. Body not shaped as bounded physical entity
2. Body emerges through its capacity to affect and be affected through its relationship to other entities: "The body is defined by what it is capable of relative to what it assembles with, thus always 'becoming' something else. Because a body could potentially enter into a relation with any number of things, it is hard to predict what a body can do" (189).
3. Affectivity: "the power and susceptibility humans, things, and circumstances have to influence and be influenced" (Kuan, p. 9)

D. Affect theory in anthropology

1. Contrast to emotion
2. Preindividual energy: circulates, always in motion, indeterminate, ineffable (190)
3. Intensity that is complex and undifferentiated but can be channeled to become emotions

E. Chinese concept of qinggan (sensory emotions, affect)

1. Interactivity with world around you
2. Fieldtrip to Summer Palace, Beijing (193-4)
3. Weather changes
4. Appreciate view of 17 arch bridge
6. "intensification of subjectivity but also the deployment of an affective economy that puts indeterminacy into play in the production of value" (201)
7. Capitalism "feeds off affect" (201)
8. Accumulating affects by the lake --> "good habits such as caring for people and for things" (201)

F. Affect theory and Chinese culture share proposition of "dynamic universe composed of fluid and transformative forces, leading to myriad change and differentiation" (199).
G. Affect is ethical

1. "Human actors are enmeshed within relational webs made of various ideas, people, and things. Through the art of disposition, it is possible to manipulate reality not by changing a given condition itself but by deploying the energy contained within a dynamic relationship and by partnering with the fluctuations of reality. In the case of the lakeside exercise, it was a sudden fluctuation in weather that was deployed. The lesson intended to demonstrate how the world teems with contagious vitality, thereby presenting multiple opportunities for stimulation and education. One need only be exposed to a given environment and encounter it with sensitivity, and change will follow as a matter of course. Although humans have limited control of their external circumstances, the moral agent in pursuit of self-cultivation may sometimes make choices about what to be exposed to" (207).
2. Art of disposition: "moral practice that simultaneously recognizes the embedment of human activity while locating opportunities for strategic manipulation" (21)
3. Dinner party analogy

H. Parenting in China: discern when and how to channel affectivity: how to manage tendencies, take initiative