Many studies have explored the effects of modernization on human experiences in China, but Fengshu Liu's Modernization as Lived Experiences stands out as a particularly insightful exploration of how modernization caused generational change, due to its use of a research methodology designed specifically to zero in on how and why contemporary teenagers, their parents and grandparents differed in their experiences and aspirations during the same life stages of adolescence and youth. This book is based on life history interviews conducted in 2011–12 with 25 male and 21 female college prep high school seniors in Beijing, as well as with 14 of the girls’ mothers, 14 of the girls’ maternal grandmothers, 12 of the boys’ fathers and 12 of the boys’ paternal grandfathers. This research methodology enables Liu to make comparisons between people of different generations who are otherwise fairly similar because they are of the same gender and family. This enables Liu to avoid mistaking socioeconomic or cultural differences for generational differences, and strengthens the rigour and validity of her arguments about generational differences. Liu's use of qualitative interviews to address generational differences within the same families thus sheds light on the effects of social change on human development in ways that are fine-grained, nuanced and engaging.
Despite the radically different historical contexts they grew up in, the grandparents and parents Liu studied experienced similar roles as children and adolescents who were expected to be dutiful and helpful to their parents while growing up naturally, and who were usually not heavily pressured to excel academically or attend college. The teenagers, however, experienced much more deliberate cultivation and parental investment in childhood and adolescence, having grown up as “priceless” singletons at the centre of their families, in an era when almost all families fervently hoped to send their children to elite universities.
Male teenagers were much more likely than their fathers and grandfathers to believe that their masculinity would be defined by their academic and professional success and achievement. Their fathers, on the other hand, talked about lacking awareness, motivation or conditions for success in their own youth, and the grandfathers talked about feeling that individual academic and professional achievement was irrelevant as well as inaccessible during their own youth, due to Maoist efforts to discourage, thwart and denigrate individual aspirations for unusually high levels of academic and professional achievement.
Female teenagers shared their male counterparts’ aspirations for academic and career success, but also aspired to attain personal happiness and become good wives and mothers. Their aspiration to have it all had been shared by their mothers in their own youth, even though most of the mothers believed that they had failed to attain that aspiration. The grandmothers, on the other hand, grew up with an ethos of self-denial and self-sacrifice required of women by both traditional and Maoist norms.
Both male and female teenagers were simultaneously more romantic, more knowledgeable and open-minded about sexuality, and more instrumental with regards to sexuality, love and marriage than their grandparents (who were very ignorant about sexuality in their own youth, and saw marriage in terms of social and familial duties instead of personal fulfilment) and parents (who wanted more personal fulfilment from sex and marriage but were still relatively sheltered and ignorant about sexuality in their own youth).
Based on her assessment of these generational differences, Liu argues that, while urban Chinese citizens experienced modernization in ways that were broadly similar to how citizens of other countries experienced modernization, the Chinese experience of modernization occurred at a more rapid pace than the modernization processes that occurred in many other societies, thus resulting in the simultaneous co-existence of multiple seemingly contradictory values, beliefs and norms. This rapidity of modernization, combined with older Chinese cultural ideals of exemplarity, caused particularly extreme aspirations for maximization of fulfilment of multiple contradictory goals and values among the latest generation of teenagers. This orientation toward maximization caused significant stress and pressure for these teenagers and their parents and grandparents, who were ostensibly glad that the youngest generation now had opportunities and aspirations for maximization that the parents and grandparents themselves had been denied in their own youth, but who also sometimes recalled the less stressful expectations of their own youth with nostalgia.
Liu's book is full of rich and thought-provoking examples and stories that allow the teenagers, parents and grandparents at the centre of her study to explain their own lives and past and current aspirations in their own words. At the same time, this is a book of rigorous scholarship that places the experiences of the research participant in the broader context of scholarship about modernization processes in China and worldwide. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in China, modernization, human development, adolescence, youth and education.
