This book investigates how educational anxiety shapes the everyday lives and moral worlds of China’s middle-class parents, revealing how emotion, modernity, and meritocracy intersect in a rapidly changing society. It offers a sociocultural perspective on family aspirations and the politics of schooling in contemporary China.
Educational anxiety has become a defining feature of China’s middle class, shaping their family life and visions of the future. This book brings together six in-depth studies that explore how parents navigate the moral, emotional, and institutional pressures of educating their children in an era of uncertainty. From the ‘double reduction’ reforms to transnational schooling choices, the chapters reveal how anxiety is both a symptom of and a response to China’s rapidly transforming education system and social structure. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and cultural studies, the book situates educational anxiety within broader processes of modernization, meritocracy, and social mobility. By examining parental reflexivity, risk management, and emotional investment, it offers an original framework for understanding the lived experiences of middle-class families in China—and their implications for global debates on education, inequality, and family change.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Chinese Education & Society.
This book investigates how educational anxiety shapes the everyday lives and moral worlds of China’s middle-class parents, revealing how emotion, modernity, and meritocracy intersect in a rapidly changing society. It offers a sociocultural perspective on family aspirations and the politics of schooling in contemporary China.
Introduction: Parenting under Pressure: Educational Anxiety and the
Making of Chinas Middle Class
1. Meritocratic Educational Beliefs,
AchievementExpectation Gaps, and Middle-Class Parental Anxiety
2. Navigating
Educational Uncertainties: Middle-Class Parental Anxieties in Chinas Double
Reduction Era
3. Healing or Concealing: Educational Anxiety, Reflexivity,
and Alternative Parenting Strategies
4. Middle-Class Education Anxiety in
China: Rising Parentocracy and Institutional Uncertainty in Social
Reproduction
5. Between Anxiety and Desire: Chinese Middle-Class Families
Drive for Study Abroad
6. Competing in Inclusive Education: Immigrant Chinese
Parental Involvement, Educational System Knowledge, and Parental Agency
Ailei Xie is Professor at the School of Education, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China. His research focuses on educational inequality and social mobility in contemporary China. His recent work examines the moral economy of parenting and middle-class educational anxiety. He has published extensively in leading Chinese and international journals.
Cheng Zhong is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Sociology of Education, Nanjing Normal University, China. He has a long-standing interest in middle-class parents educational involvement, aspirations, anxieties, and reflexivity. He has published in peer-reviewed, high-status international journals such as the British Journal of Sociology of Education and the International Journal of Educational Research.
