The question is a source of heated debate at a critical moment in China's long march toward modernization – “whether Chinese society is indeed following a path parallel to the development of a kind of second modernity Beck and Beck-Gernsheim find unfolding in Europe and the West” – as Svarverud synthesizes in this volume on China's individualization process (p. 194). With their examination of four different types of modernity, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim's foreword to this volume contextualizes the intellectual concern raised by this question within a consideration of three analytical dimensions: economic production and reproduction (capitalism); the nature of political authority; and socio-cultural integration (individualization, cosmopolitanization, and religion). Yan Yunxiang, author of the introductory chapter, further examines how, by the end of the 1990s, the longing for personal well-being and affective ties dominated the rise of the individual in rural China, while, at the same time, the state's hostility toward self-organization and an autonomous society directly triggered a tendency to emphasize personal rights at the expense of obligations to and rights of others. In other words, Yan explores how and why the contested individualization process in China ended up by creating “uncivil individuals” (p. 2). In the context of the individualization thesis proposed by European social theorists, the group of Nordic and Chinese scholars who contributed to this volume participate here in an ongoing dialogue, confronting Chinese studies with Western theories on the rise of Chinese individual in both private and public domains.

The core of the debate concerns the relationship between the Chinese individual and the social collectives, i.e. the family and the state. As Yan astutely points out, the emergence of the individual in China occurred in the absence of a parallel democratic value of individualism, one that would treat the individual fundamentally as a right holder in a Western-style welfare state system. Instead, since the time of late Qing imperial dynasty, advocates of individual freedom have always articulated their argument in reference to, and in consideration of, the nation state. This point is further elaborated in the chapters authored by Svarverud and Muhlhahn. In his examination of individual self-discipline and collective freedom, Svarverud refers back to Liang Qichao and other intellectual elites from the beginning of the 20th century who sought modernity in a “battleground of new terms and new ideas on society” (p. 198). The development of the differentiation of the minor self from the greater self illustrates that, even when the concept of the absolute freedom and autonomy of the individual arose in the new culture movement, political concerns for the self-discipline of the individual still fixed the individual to his role in the nation-building process. In Muhlhahn's examination of the individual under Imperial, Republican and Socialist legal regimes, he further confirms that “no system developed a concept of individual rights or entitlements that shielded the individual from excesses of state power” (p. 243). It was actually the opening-up policy instituted in 1978 that marked a turning point for law and criminal justice in China; at that point, the Chinese government started to recognize the right of the accused and appointed defence lawyers to criminal defendants in legal proceedings.

The rest of the volume can be read in two parts, each having a different focus on the experiences of urban and rural Chinese during the process of individualization. Li Minghuan's chapter addresses the experiences of Chinese returnees from overseas and their collective protest when the state agricultural industry collapsed and forced them to search for individual work options. Rolandsen's case study of young volunteers in Quanzhou demonstrates how NGOs created an effective collective niche for urban youth when economic and social changes increasingly forced them to rely on family and kinship networks “in order to carve out a predictable future” (p. 157).

In contrast to these reluctant attitudes toward becoming individual citizens in a de-collectivized urban China, rural Chinese are more willing to embrace the individual freedom created by economic reform. Hansen and Pang's chapter demonstrates how rural youth defied stereotypes of the passive rural migrant worker who roams between coastal cities and works in various low-paid jobs without long-term contracts to protect their rights. The search for freedom – for personal choice in matters of love and work – mixed with imaginations of the modern industrial world, stimulated aspirations in these workers and kept them “floating.” Thorgerson and Ni's case study of the rural elderly also shows that rural parents are becoming much more accepting of a broader variety of intergenerational relationships and living arrangements. Delman and Yin's chapter on Sun Dawu, a self-made rural private entrepreneur, offers an account of how he dared to challenge his local government and question national policy from his peasant perspective.

Such a sharp contrast between rural and urban attitudes toward individualization is further reinforced by an analysis of the individual in contemporary Chinese literature. The lonesome atmosphere repeatedly evoked by urban authors like Chen Ran seems extremely pale next to the forceful image of Wolf Totem in depictions of nomadic Inner Mongolia. Wedell-Wedellsborg's chapter on literary analysis captures this contrast and encourages readers to contemplate its origin. In Yan Yunxiang's own words, “the prolonged rural–urban dual structure in Chinese socialism, which made rural residents second-class citizens and deprived them of most of the social welfare entitlements enjoyed by urban residents, effectively made Chinese villagers into a proletariat who, to borrow from Marx, have nothing to lose but their chains” (p. 33).