Xiaorong Gu

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are under-diagnosed, underprivileged, and under-supported within China's child population of 298 million. They live in a context where a comprehensive national policy tailored to their needs is yet to materialize, access to specialized services is limited, and social stigma is entrenched. As such, families become front-line support and the de facto safety net for these vulnerable children. In this study, leveraging publicly available “we-media” data comprising family stories by 88 mothers of autistic children, I conduct a two-layered narrative analysis that seeks to understand their experiences raising autistic children and their narrative strategies to construct their self-identities and their children's identities in society. The thematic analysis of mothers’ experiences reveals a pattern of “expansive mothering” among mothers of children with ASD. This form of mothering encompasses multiple, overlapping roles: primary caregiver, (semi-)professional ASD therapist, education agent or facilitator, and social justice advocate for their children. Also emerging from the data is a narrative of “strong motherhood”, which draws from the cultural script of the “good mother” ( liangmu ) in Confucian ideals and the class discourse of “eating bitterness” that valorize mothers’ moral strength, child-centric care practices and educational labor, and maternal sacrifices. This study documents the coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of Chinese families in caring for special needs children, especially the gendered parental care and labor by “strong mothers”, and opens theoretical spaces to address the linkages between gender, care, and social justice in special needs settings.

This entry examines the evolution of policies and the burgeoning literature on the education of children from rural migrant families in urban China since the 1980s. It is found that at the policy level, there has been a shift towards expanding migrant children's access to public education (particularly during the Compulsory Education stage) by the central government, which has been implemented to varying degrees by local governments. In practice, empirical evidence suggests that school segregation remains but evolves into new and more nuanced forms, which have profound implications for migrant children's educational experiences and trajectories. A growing body of research challenges the prevailing discourse of migrant children's underachievement, bringing the children's own agency and subjectivities and their families’ resilience into the picture. The entry concludes by situating the education of China's migrant children within broader debates on segregation, exclusion and social inequality, and discusses the relevant policy implications.

Epidemiological evidence indicates that approximately 17.5% of the population in mainland China experience some form of mental health disorder (Phillips et al., 2009), which would correspond to ove...

In June 2015, the news of four siblings who committed suicide in poverty-stricken Guizhou Province shocked China and exposed to the world the hardship of "left-behind" childrenchildren who stay behind in rural villages while their parents move to cities for work. My recent article in the journal Current Sociology argues that the persistence of this problem is rooted in the state's neoliberal-authoritarian approach towards governing the rural migrant population. The hukou system enables the urban local governments to keep rural migrants as a "floating population" rather than settlers, which necessitates rural migrant families' splithousehold living arrangements. At the same time, mainstream media and public policies pathologize social issues in this population.

Focusing on men’s negotiation of traditional norms and new gender dynamics amidst rapid social changes, the current study reveals nuanced trends and inter-regional heterogeneity in marriage behavior of men during the past decades in Asian societies. Since the 1970s, marriage age for men across Asia has risen and the slope of change is especially sharp in East Asia; while men in East and Southeast Asia increasingly remain single in their 30s and early 40s, earlier and almost universal marriage continues to dominate men’s nuptiality in South Asian societies. We contextualize these empirical patterns in the complex interplay of aggregate-level socioeconomic development, the changing labor market conditions (as reflected in a high level of job insecurity and informalization), shifting gender dynamics in educational attainment and labor market participation, and remaining legacies of traditional gender role expectations. This study offers compelling empirical evidence for further theorizing marriage and gender in Asia.

Existing scholarship on the lives and wellbeing of China’s left-behind children often frames the issues as a function of their parents’ migration, which leaves a significant gap in discussing the role of the state in shaping the institutional framework that these families operate within, cope or struggle with. Through critically interrogating public discourses based on articles from a mainstream newspaper and policy documents since the early 2000s, this article situates a sociological inquiry into the discursive and institutional framework addressing ‘the left-behind children problem’ in China within the problematic of the relationship between children, family, and the state. The analysis reveals seemingly ‘disingenuous’ articulations of left-behind children’s value in the mainstream media and official policies. On the one hand, there seems to be a prevailing concern over the welfare of left-behind children which has grave implications for the country’s future development. On the other hand, the dominant discourse attributes left-behind children’s ‘miserable’ plight to their ‘pathological’ family life, which translates into policy efforts to discipline rural migrant families according to a family ideology rooted in urban middle-class experiences. I argue that such inconsistencies should be contextualized in the state’s neoliberal-authoritarian governance of the migrant population in the post-reform era, which perpetuates a stereotype of ‘the pathological family’ to account for left-behind children’s disadvantages while evading, hence up until recent years avoiding to redress, the political-economic factors underlying their plight. I conclude the article by ruminating on the theoretical, social and policy implications of this study.

The sociology of childhood is currently at a crossroads for developing research agendas beyond the ‘new’ social studies of childhood of the 1980s and 1990s, which suffer from four problems: cultural relativism derived from binary conceptualizations of childhood, Northern normativity that ill-fits Southern realities, methodological issues related to the preferred child-centric and participatory research, and disengagement from mainstream sociological theories. In this article, based on a relational conceptualization of value, the author calls for a value turn that could open childhood theorization both to new forms of cultural analysis of social processes at the familial, national, and global scales, and to new forms of applied research on policy fronts such as childcare and education policies, civil society engagement, and parenting. Focusing on the value of children bridges the gap between childhood sociology and mainstream sociological theories. It also allows for thinking across analytical scales and methodological approaches, and decentralizes knowledge production about childhood from the discipline’s Euromerican-centric traditions.