Qian Liu’s book offers a comprehensive account of what constrains China’s leftover women, tracing the forces that push them towards heterosexual marriage and reproduction, away from alternative family structures, and into acquiescence towards laws they recognise as unjust but feel little impulse to challenge. The central argument of this book is that leftover women’s relationship with law is driven by understandings of what constitutes a filial daughter and a responsible citizen (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 145), understandings constructed through intergenerational relationships and interactions with the broader community. This co-constructing process is what Liu terms relation-based legal consciousness. The book extends both feminist relational theory and legal consciousness scholarship by demonstrating that in a relation-based society such as China, orientations towards law are not anchored in self and autonomy, as Anglo-American scholarship tends to assume, but in obligation (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 64).

The book begins by offering a more complex account of Chinese parent–daughter relationships than the dyadic narrative of patriarchal villains and their resisters. Liu situates parental anxiety within the political economy of the one-child family. After three decades of the one-child policy, “the downflow of family resources” from the older generation to the young, including housing, childcare, and retirement schedules built around grandparenting, has become “a key feature of Chinese intergenerational relationships” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 52). This downflow is both an expression of love and a justification for parents to intervene in their daughters’ marriage and childbearing (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 53), leaving daughters with a debt they can never fully account for. Parental anxiety is itself shaped by continuous interaction with the surrounding community, where community expectations inform what parents believe they should expect, and daughters feel obligated to alleviate that anxiety or else suffer guilt.

This leads to the book’s central concept: relation-based legal consciousness, defined as “a process whereby an individual constantly picks up signals from the broader community and interaction with her close ones to construct her version of the close ones’ expectations and develop strategies to deal with the law accordingly” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 58). Because frank communication between daughters and parents about remaining single or being non-heterosexual is prohibitively costly, daughters piece together their version of parental expectations from community signals rather than from direct conversation. These constructed parental expectations “can sometimes trump what their parents have explicitly expressed” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 20). Liu positions this concept as a subset of relational legal consciousness, extending Young and Chimowitz’s second-order legal consciousness, and borrowing Shuming Liang’s concept of the relation-based society (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 59). She places obligation rather than autonomy and agency at the centre of how relationships shape legal consciousness.

Leftover women develop different strategies towards law according to their resources. Under the discourse of suzhi, women who have accumulated sufficient economic and cultural capital are tacitly permitted to circumvent reproductive law through cross-border or underground assisted reproduction, while “low-quality” women are judged undeserving. Yet Liu shows this promise is largely illusory, as the most privileged women are also the most tightly bound by family reputation and often end up entering marriage to satisfy parental expectations. Accumulating suzhi is thus “at best a placebo and at worse an illusion and even false hope” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 108). For queer women, the strategy takes the form of xinghun, the nominal marriage, which appropriates the law’s imprimatur to manage relational pressure.

This book captures well a shift in analytical perspective that relationality in societies such as China should not be treated merely as an exotic cultural variable or a local extension of second-order legal consciousness applied to non-Western settings. In a relation-based society, every ostensibly dyadic interaction is already a multi-party event. Daughters, parents, and community are co-constructing a shared reality (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 79), and actors perform affiliative social tuning when they want to “get along with their interaction partners” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 70). This is why such a vast population of single women has “few illusions about what the law can do” and remains uninterested in challenging the marriage and reproductive laws (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 146). Research on legal consciousness and legal mobilisation in Asia would benefit from taking this structural insight as a starting point rather than treating it as a cultural footnote.

This attention on relationships invites several further considerations. Liu acknowledges that she could not gather stories of women “whose parents were toxic and kept asking instead of giving” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 154) due to data limitations. Yet such cases exist in China. Daughters whose parents divorced early, provided little care, or imposed financial burdens nonetheless face pressure from extended kin, aunts, and uncles who take it upon themselves to police compliance with social expectations. In these cases, the obligation that drives compliance cannot derive primarily from resource exchange since what flowed downward was minimal compared to the substantial investments Liu describes—nothing resembling housing deposits or years of grandparenting, perhaps only occasional holiday greetings. What generates obligation here is kinship position itself, together with something harder to name, the longing for a place to belong, for inclusion within a family rather than isolation from it. Enforcement often comes from the broader community when some parents, having given little, lack the standing to press the demand themselves. This confirms the centrality of the relational self in understanding relation-based legal consciousness, as daughters’ perceptions of what they owe and how they should behave derive from signals received across the community, instead of solely from direct negotiation with their parents.

The core dataset was collected in 2016 and 2017 (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 157), a period when the leftover women and suzhi discourses were still prominent in media and everyday language. Social attitudes have shifted since. Younger women, particularly those under 30, are more articulate in critiquing the leftover women label. They identify its stigmatising and manipulative function more quickly and possess the feminist vocabulary to name it. This shift is connected to the #MeToo wave of 2018 and the digital feminist publics that followed, to the first lawsuit by an unmarried woman seeking egg-freezing services, filed in late 2018 and attracting sustained public attention through its first-instance decision in 2022 and appeal in 2024 (Wu, Reference Wu2019; Li and Yu, Reference Li and Yu2024), and to the viral vlogs of the female CEO of a cosmetics company who became a single mother by choice via an overseas sperm bank (Lu, Reference Lu2024). These events brought alternative family structures into public view.

Yet the pressure described in this book has not disappeared. Beneath the leftover women discourse, the deeper structure of obligation and the imperative to satisfy parental expectations remain intact. Some now regard the term “leftover women” as old-fashioned, but they replace it with claims that carry an air of scientific objectivity, such as “thirty is the optimal age for marriage and childbearing.” Parents still worry about old-age care, continuation of family lines, community standing, family reputation, and demonstrating success through their daughters’ marriages. Liu’s 2023 interview with Lifeng in Calgary demonstrates this; as seven years and an ocean removed from Fujian, the pressure remains suffocating.

The suzhi discourse has similarly evolved. In everyday urban parlance, it is increasingly replaced by a more direct narrative of economic success. Yet the core logic Liu identifies still holds: sufficient wealth is read as a licence to bypass the law. Audiences celebrating the female CEO’s single motherhood routinely attribute her freedom to her financial success.

Moreover, Liu’s observation that people link suzhi to the perceived right to choose alternative family structures invites closer scrutiny. The attitudes Liu documents contain a glaring tension: respondents invoke the well-being of the nation to condemn “low-quality” women, fearing their choices “may create a burden for society and the nation-state” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 112). Yet these same people grant wealthy women tacit permission to circumvent the exact same laws. If protecting state interests were their true concern, wealthy women’s disregard for state reproductive laws would not be so easily tolerated. This inconsistency suggests that the appeal to a “national burden” functions more as a respectable pretext than a genuine civic concern. Beneath it lies a societal assumption that heterosexual marriage is the default structure for managing the economic risks of child-rearing, and that opting out is inherently deviant. When a lower-income woman steps outside this arrangement, she faces censure for both violating the expected life course and failing to demonstrate the capacity to bear the costs alone. When a wealthy woman does the same, her capital neutralises the economic objection, but the normative objection persists, which is why the hostility diminishes but never fully disappears. In this system, a woman’s reproductive autonomy is thus never a given. Higher “quality” buys her partial relief from censure but never enough to escape judgement entirely. That such relief must be purchased at all reveals how deeply women’s reproductive decisions are treated as public matters rather than private ones.

At the 2026 Law and Society Association meeting in San Francisco, David Engel remarked that on closing this book one sees Qian Liu vividly, and that no one else could have written it. The most durable research tends to come from scholars who genuinely need the answer, and Liu never pretends to stand outside her material. She is the storyteller and the observer throughout, and her sensibility is this book’s undertone. Liu ends by admitting that “after conducting research on this topic for a decade, I still did not have a solution” (Liu, Reference Liu2025, p. 143). The final pages return to her own relationship with her parents, a scene suspended between love and pain. It concerns the researcher, her participants, and her readers alike. I turned the page expecting more and found it blank—as the problem itself remains. Having finished the appendix on fieldwork, I am grateful that Liu undertook this research and wrote this book, and I hope that qualitative work of this depth continues to find its way to readers.