The Good Child

Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool

Jing Xu

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Chinese academic traditions take zuo ren —self-fulfillment in terms of moral cultivation—as the ultimate goal of education. To many in contemporary China, however, the nation seems gripped by moral decay, the result of rapid and profound social change over the course of the twentieth century. Placing Chinese children, alternately seen as China's greatest hope and derided as self-centered "little emperors, " at the center of her analysis, Jing Xu investigates the effects of these transformations on the moral development of the nation's youngest generation.

The Good Child examines preschool-aged children in Shanghai, tracing how Chinese socialization beliefs and methods influence their construction of a moral world. Delving into the growing pains of an increasingly competitive and changing educational environment, Xu documents the confusion, struggles, and anxieties of today's parents, educators, and grandparents, as well as the striking creativity of their children in shaping their own moral practices. Her innovative blend of anthropology and psychology reveals the interplay of their dialogues and debates, illuminating how young children's nascent moral dispositions are selected, expressed or repressed, and modulated in daily experiences.

1

Cultivating Morality: Educational Aspirations and Anxieties

“Little Emperors,” Education, and Morality: What Is at Stake for Parents?

Father: He (Tiantian) is the one and only. What kind of costs are unaffordable for us? That is the failure of (Tiantian’s) education. We are anxious about his future. Both of us (mother and father) have a kind of elite consciousness/aspiration (jingying yishi). Perhaps eighty or ninety percent of Chinese parents have this elite consciousness/aspiration (jingying yishi).

Mother: What does “society” mean? It means individuals living in their own ways. It is now our one and only chance to influence my son when he is very young. We don’t know if we will succeed or fail. If the society is “wholesome” and the general direction where people are going is good, then no matter how we educate him, he will not likely go the wrong way. However, the worst case is when the society is bad. Then how we educate him really matters, and the consequence will loom large.

These two quotes reflect parental aspirations and anxieties regarding the interplay between education and morality in the project of raising the “little emperors.” Tiantian, a boy in Class 3A, lives with his parents and maternal grandparents in the neighborhood where Biyu Preschool is located. Both of his parents are native Shanghainese who graduated from top universities in Shanghai and got good secure jobs, the father in the government sector and the mother in a national corporation. Tiantian is the only child of the family; he was born when his parents were in their early thirties. For this “post-seventies”¹ couple, the most salient difference between parenting today and parenting in the last generation was that compared to their own parents, they were much more focused on the child and much more anxious about child-rearing. These comments from Tiantian’s father and mother point to the key theme and main argument of this chapter: Chinese socializers today are caught up in profound quandaries, as they live with extraordinary aspirations for their children’s future success and tremendous anxieties regarding child-rearing, amid China’s rapid social transformations, including the ramifications of the one-child policy and the perceived “moral crisis.”

The one-child policy definitely weighs in here. In contrast to the previous generations, when parents had to take care of several children at the same time and thus didn’t have that much energy to devote to each child, the singleton child Tiantian is the “one and only” who matters to his family, and they can’t afford the failure of his education in today’s fierce competition. They are not alone in battling against such anxieties. As Tiantian’s father said, this situation was not confined to people like them who received elite education and got established in middle-class life in Shanghai; rather, most parents in China today had such elite consciousness/aspirations (jingying yishi). The popular term jingying yishi, used by Tiantian’s father, refers to both parents’ consciousness of their own elite educational-social background or parents’ high educational aspirations projected on to their children. For example, Tiantian’s father often took the young boy to Fudan University, a top university in Shanghai and his alma mater, with the hope that someday the son would get in this or a better university and build a bright future. Aspirations like this hold true also for parents without such an elite educational background. For example, in her ethnographic book on singleton youths in China, Vanessa Fong (2004) describes the high educational aspirations shared by parents and students across various socio-economic, educational, and professional backgrounds. According to her, singleton teenagers in Dalian, a city in northeastern China, were trying to make a road to the first-world amid the third-world realities, and they “fear that too many people are trying to squeeze onto a road that is not widening fast enough” (Fong 2004: 182). In the book Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China, Andrew Kipnis (2011) analyzes why high levels of educational desire have arisen in a county in Shandong province, where most students come from rural families. He demonstrates that such strong parental ambition and educational desire were not entirely the product of China’s one-child policy. Instead, they are deeply rooted in China’s historical dynamics, where culture, politics, and education intersected to form “the Imperial governing complex” (Kipnis 2011: 90).

Tiantian’s mother emphasized the other part of the equation. On the one hand, parents have extraordinary educational aspirations on the only child’s future success. On the other hand, there is tremendous pressure toward moral education because early childhood is critical for a child’s moral upbringing and because people believe the society at large is undergoing a moral crisis. As she said, “It is now our one and only chance to influence my son when he is very young.” She believed that parenting in early childhood was crucial to shaping the child’s character, personality, and ways of thinking and doing. She was, however, not sure whether her own or others’ parenting would turn out to be successful, and such uncertainty was greatly amplified at a time when the dominant social trends went against the child’s healthy psychological development. As she hinted, good parenting was critical for battling against the negative social environment and shaping a mentally healthy child.

Parents believe that, in addition to the child’s own future, cultivating morality among young children matters also for the future of the Chinese society and nation. According to this logic, a “bad society” undermines the moral education of its members, while at the same time a “bad education” exacerbates the societal moral crisis. It sounds like a chicken-and-egg situation and no one can answer which comes first. In the moral realm, individual agency—even of the youngest ones—and societal forces impact each other in complex feedback chains, and education mediates between the two. My friend Jianxia, who had taught in various preschools for ten years before she became a stay-at-home mother and homeschooling teacher, made such incisive comments on the relations among education, morality, and the society:

The purpose of education, I think, is that I hope my children and students will grow up as self-reliant people who can enjoy their own life but are also responsible for others and the society. Why are there so many problems in our society today? Why are we surrounded by poisonous infant formula and food? That’s because we lack the moral senses, especially the concern and sense of responsibility for others. We only care about ourselves, and other people’s misery or deaths have nothing to do with us. I can pollute this place as long as I make money. I can send my children abroad, and I don’t care if others are breathing polluted air.

Look at the reality of education. The most important thing for parents now is to instill among children these ideas: that you need to do well in academics, you need to make money in the future and live a successful life and fulfill your filial piety. See, that’s obnoxiously selfish! It’s all about your own interests as parents. Then we (parents) go compete against others and harm others. In order to get into a certain position, we do things unscrupulously. We bribe the officials in order to squeeze our children into a better school, which means at the same time you push the other child who deserves that position out of the game. This is an extremely unjust society. Think about how our children grow up, starting from preschool—oh no, even earlier than that, from when we are pregnant. We do everything we can to get a better doctor (for child delivery) or a bed in the better maternity ward, even through unjust means.²

Jianxia was worried about the vicious circle between selfish individuals and unjust society, mediated by bad parenting/education. The tension she described is multifaceted: First, education aims for producing individuals and citizens who care not only about themselves but also about others and the larger society. In the course of fierce competition for all kinds of resources starting from childbirth, however, socializers themselves become selfish and have no consideration for other people’s interests. Second, one cannot expect such extremely selfish education to produce “good” children/future members of the society. Third, even the seemingly legitimate educational purposes, such as to make money and become successful, are essentially selfish and unjust if one believes that the ultimate mission for education is to cultivate good human beings. Her comments echo the classical philosophical question of the “moral limits of markets” (Sandel 2010) in the sense that certain domains of humanity that we tend to treasure, such as basic rights to human life and education, are threatened by the encroaching, inhumane market logic. Such complaints are quite common in Chinese public discourse in general, and in the local context of Shanghai, too.

No doubt, problems such as bribery in education and hospitals or unsafe food cannot be entirely reduced to declining personal and interpersonal moral standards. My informants, however, frequently mentioned these problems and tied them to morality and education. The tendency to link morality—framed as personal virtue, education as self-cultivation, and the bigger social order—as a coupled whole is a well-engrained Chinese mentality (Bakken 2000).

I couldn’t help but wonder, what is really at stake for these parents and socializers? The anthropological concept of “moral experience” helps me to think in depth about this question. This concept refers to “what is locally at stake”: “What matters most in the mundane and extraordinary transpersonal details that bind and define us through relationships, work, and the close politics of a particular place is the overwhelmingly pragmatic orientation of men and women everywhere” (Kleinman 1999: 70). As people act based on what really matters to them upon the specific temporal-local contingencies, there is “a deep mixture of often contradictory emotions and values whose untidy uniqueness defines the existential core of the individual” (Kleinman 2006: 10). Focusing on contemporary China, Kleinman and his colleagues (Kleinman et al. 2011) went on to inquire about the making and remaking of the moral person during China’s profound social transformations. Their central argument is that the new subjectivity arising in the midst of rapid social transformations is the “divided self” (Kleinman 2011: 5), a self that is divided by different standards and goals that conflict with one another, such as self-interest versus ethical conduct. One important piece is missing in this picture, however, and that is the dreams and struggles of Chinese parents and socializers when it comes to what really matters for them and their whole lives: the making of the new moral person—their “only hope”—in this increasingly competitive society. As anthropologists of Chinese education have noticed, Chinese parental aspiration for children’s educational and career ambitions and success is construed as a moral project, and the moral nature of such a project is intertwined with “the long history in China of parents finding existential meaning in the success of their children” (Kipnis 2009: 215). Along these lines, I will unravel the moral quandaries that Biyu Preschool parents are concerned with, between their educational aspirations and their educational anxieties, in the particular environment of Shanghai.

Building the Moral Foundation in Early Childhood

Cultivating morality in early childhood is a significant theme in historical traditions of Chinese ethics, education, and learning. In today’s China, building a good moral foundation from a young age is emphasized in educational discourse, policies, and practice. The importance of moral education in early childhood is also a shared belief among Biyu Preschool teachers and parents. I will demonstrate these points following.

Early Childhood and Moral Cultivation: Historical Traditions and Contemporary Beliefs

It is a deeply entrenched tradition that moral education in early childhood is viewed as crucial to the cultivation of a full-fledged moral personhood, as the contemporary neo-Confucian philosopher Tu Wei-Ming summarizes, “Despite divergent approaches to the actual process of moral and spiritual self-development, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism all share this fundamental belief: Although existentially human beings are not what they ought to be, they can be perfected through self-cultivation” (Tu 1985: 25).

Imprints of this tradition that place an important emphasis on self-cultivation in early childhood are still visible in contemporary education policies (Cheng 2000) and state discourses. For example, since the Chinese government’s official Program for Improving Civic Morality (Chinese Community Party 2001) emphasized moral education as an important battleground, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced its Chinese “Little Citizens” Moral Cultivation Plan. This official announcement intended to provide clear guidelines for moral education among three- to eighteen-year-old Chinese children and youths (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China 2002). It blended Confucian traditions with socialism and postsocialism values, emphasizing a variety of qualities such as filial piety, care for family, respect for others, cooperation, altruism, frugality, patriotism, politeness, honesty, trustworthy, care for collective property, protecting the environment, diligence and independence, and creativity.

Moreover, a focus on moral education in early childhood figures into parenting goals (Wu 1996) and teaching philosophies (Jin Li 2012). For example, intellectual ideas concern the characteristics of “the Chinese learner”—who excels in academic performance but is more docile and passive in learning—have evolved in recent decades as Chinese educational, historical, and sociocultural contexts undergo rapid changes (Watkins and Biggs 2001; Chan and Rao 2009). But deep continuities regarding the purpose of learning are still observed. Studies about “the Chinese learner” indicate that the belief in perfecting oneself morally/socially as the primary purpose of learning is still prevalent in today’s China, and cultural differences in beliefs of learning emerge in early childhood, that is, Chinese children as young as age four talk more about self-improving morally (becoming a good child) than American counterparts (Li 2010: 60).

Early Childhood and Moral Cultivation: Ethnographic Evidence

The idea of “cultivating morality” as an important task in early childhood, drawing on historical traditions and continuing to shape contemporary values, is also shared among the parents of Biyu Preschool. In the beginning phase of my fieldwork, I administered the child-rearing questionnaire with ninety-two families at Biyu Preschool (77 percent of all the families at the time). The questionnaire has twenty questions (some with sub-questions) clustered in three sections, including family socio-economic information, reproduction values, and children’s social moral development. The section on children’s social moral development consisted of ten questions probing into caregivers’ evaluations and attitudes about children’s morality in general, the roles of parents, school, and other people, intergenerational similarities and differences in child-rearing values, as well as the desirable and nondesirable moral traits of children. One question was: “What do you think is/are the most important mission(s) of preschool education?” It had seven possible responses:

A. Transmitting basic knowledge

B. Enlightening interest in learning

C. Molding moral character

D. Teaching rules in social life

E. Fostering interpersonal interactions

F. Training daily-life habits

G. Cultivating artistic quality (suzhi)³

This question allows parents to choose more than one answer, and it is followed by a “why” question to elicit parents’ free responses as to why they thought a particular mission was important. Out of the eighty-five families who responded to this question, fifty [59 percent] parents chose E (fostering interpersonal interactions), thirty-nine [46 percent] chose C (molding moral character), thirty-three [39 percent] chose B (enlightening the interests in learning), twenty-nine [34 percent] chose F (training daily-life habits), twenty-six [31 percent] chose A (transmitting basic knowledge), twenty-three [28 percent] chose D (teaching rules in social life,), and five [6 percent] chose G (cultivating artistic quality). Taken together, social moral development (fostering interpersonal interactions and molding moral character) is the most salient theme in parents’ responses.

Cultivating morality in the Chinese tradition essentially means to learn to “be human” (Tu 1985) or “act/become human” (zuo ren). This is an all-encompassing concept that denotes the nearly endless process of coming to understand what it means to be human, how to navigate various kinds of social relationships and contexts, and how to behave in ways that are humane in a culturally specific sense. A large part of this is about ordinary ethics that involve both tacit understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Becoming a Moral Child in China
• 1. Cultivating Morality: Educational Aspirations and Anxieties
• 2. Feeling into Another’s Heart: When Empathy Is Endangered
• 3. Negotiating Property Distribution: The Contested Space of Ownership and Fairness
• 4. Sharing Discourse and Practice: The Selfish Child, Generosity and Reciprocity
• 5. Disciplining the Little Emperors: Navigating on Shifting Grounds
• Conclusion: Becoming Human in a Time of Moral Crisis
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index