This book is an original, ethnographic study of the emergence of a new type of thinking about children and their rights in urban China. It brings together evidence from a variety of Chinese government, academic, pedagogic and media publications, and from interviews and participant observations conducted in schools and homes in Shanghai, China.
Orna Naftali is Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Introduction 1. Recasting Children as Autonomous Persons: Children as Future Citizens and Workers 2. Children's Right to Self-Ownership: Space, Privacy and Punishment 3. Constituting Rights as Needs: Psychology and the Rise of Middle Class Childhood 4. The Filial Child Revisited: Tradition Holds its Ground in Modern Shanghai Conclusion