In Family Revolution, Hui Faye Xiao draws on a broad selection of Chinese novels, television series, and films to represent the problems and contradictions of contemporary marriage and domestic culture. Within this overarching concern with family dynamics, she is most interested in representations of divorce, and even more narrowly in the experience of middle-aged women. A very fine introduction explains how the legal, political, and economic shifts after 1976 altered family relationships and specifically how state promotion of no-fault consensual divorce made divorce easier and cheaper in China than in almost any other part of the world. Xiao's intellectual debts to Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Ulrich Beck, Raymond Williams, and Pierre Bourdieu are explicit and establish the theoretical points of departure for her larger argument about the limits on the freedom of “the post-socialist subject” (p. 4).

Chapter 1, “Divorcing the Rural,” pivots on two short stories: “Return, Cried the Cuckoo” (1980) and “Flying Far” (1981), co-authored by Chen Kexiong and Ma Ming. In the first story, the rural wife holds on to her poet husband; in the second she loses him to the city scientist. Xiao's purpose in foregrounding these two stories is partially to critique contemporary “nostalgia for the 1980s” (p. 28), but primarily to identify an “alliance of science and literature” (p. 30) that privileged metropolitan romance and made a “feminized countryside synonymous with a timeless and stagnant ‘small peasant mindset’” (p. 51).

Chapter 2, “Midlife Crisis and Misogynist Rhetoric: Male Intellectuals' Divorce Narratives,” and chapter 3, “Utopia or Dystopia: The Sisterhood of Divorced Women,” move our attention from fiction of the 1980s to the films of the 1990s. Read in dialogue with each other, the two chapters present an extended discussion about the persistence of patriarchy. More narrowly, they highlight how “the mission of the new mother is to reproduce the filiation of the post-socialist new man—a cosmopolitan individual living up to the global standard of biopolitical masculinity” (p. 114).

Chapter 4, “What Quality Do Chinese Wives Lack?,” focuses on a 2004 television serial adapted from a novel by Wang Hailing that follows the demise and then potential rebirth of a marriage between a surgeon and his schoolteacher wife. For Xiao, the series illustrates a systemic turn toward “authoritarian neoliberalism” (p. 117) and “neoliberal governmentality” (p. 138).

In the final substantive chapter, “Seeking Second Chances in a Risk Society,” Xiao introduces films released since 2000. Her initial theoretical point of departure is Ulrich Beck's work on modern risk society, but more broadly Xiao wants to use the romantic failures of middle-aged women to challenge those who accept the “teleological linearity of progressive historic time” (p. 176).

The stories and films discussed in Family Revolution provide cultural benchmarks across the past three decades. For those who do not study contemporary China or for those who need English translations or subtitles to gain access to these stories and films, the book is a gold mine. A superb bibliography of English and Chinese sources documents the intellectual lineages of the book, and two appendices provide titles (in English and Chinese), release dates, and names of directors for nearly 100 of the most widely viewed television dramas and films released after 1990. In addition, because many of the films Xiao cites (e.g., Yan Xueshu's Wild Mountain [1986], Wu Tianming's Old Well [1986], Wang Hailing's Chinese Style Divorce [2004], Ann Hui's The Postmodern Life of My Aunt [2006], and Wang Quan'an's Tu Ya's Marriage [2006]) can be viewed in the classroom, the book (or selected chapters) would be a useful supplement in courses where students read the key stories or watch the films. And finally, because Xiao so frequently engages European social theory and film criticism, the book addresses the urgent need to integrate Chinese experiences and analyses into intellectual discourse that focuses primarily on the literature and films of the Americas and Europe.

The book, however, will not satisfy all audiences. For example, Xiao is unlikely to persuade those who do not accept fiction as substantial evidence. Nor will she convince those who do not explain abuse of power and rising gender inequality primarily as a function of neoliberalism. As a result, Xiao is unlikely to convince readers for whom fiction must be read in dialogue with additional sources of information such as census data, focus groups, life histories, or large-scale surveys. Nor will she convince those for whom repeated reliance on the adjective “neoliberal” signals an ideological, not an analytic, point of departure.