The Good Child is an eminently readable study of moral subjectification in a private preschool located in a middle-class neighbourhood of Shanghai's Pudong district. Xu presents the study as a “theoretical adventure of bridging anthropology and psychology” (p. 3), and the book very much accomplishes its goal of trying to understand how the cultural dynamics of a particular social context shape the development of basic human potentials. A major innovation lies in Xu's combination of immersive fieldwork with psychology experiments, which yielded information about “developmental trajectories,” that is, when certain capacities emerge and develop. The experiments also provided a means for engaging young children on their own terms, that is to say, they were experienced by the “test subjects” as games. Most importantly, the descriptions in the book, rich and fine-grained, are based on daily visits to Biyu Preschool, where Xu observed classroom interactions, shared meals with teachers and waited, as a fellow parent, for children to finish playing at the end of the day. The 40 in-depth interviews conducted with parents, teachers, grandparents and nannies rest on the rapport Xu built as a member of the community.

While The Good Child very much straddles the fields of cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, its contribution to China studies is unmistakable. It documents how urban, middle-class parents and preschool teachers socialize young children in a time of moral crisis, facing a cutthroat society that rewards strategic calculators rather than sincerity and goodness. Having to compete with one another for better schools and for the care and attention of teachers, while worrying about the potential selfishness of their only child, parents find themselves in what Xu calls “situations of dissonance” (p. 64). How to handle the confusion a child will feel when your actions contradict what they have learned in school? How to explain to a five-year-old why daddy bought gift cigarettes for his own teacher at driving school (pp. 66–67)? How to reconcile the contradiction between values and reality?

Xu's informants perceive a vicious cycle from which there seems to be no escape: a morally polluted society undermines socialization efforts, “while at the same time a ‘bad education’ exacerbates the societal moral crisis” (p. 32). When it comes to the issue of sharing, the standard teaching at Biyu Preschool is egalitarianism. “Children are encouraged to bring enough pieces of candy to share with all other students,” Xu writes, “If they forget to do so, the teacher will remind them to bring more the next day” (p. 125). But children at Biyu do engage in “underground,” strategic sharing, something they become more sophisticated about with age (pp. 132, 143). Even those who behave according to the norms of the preschool may be suspected of being generous for strategic reasons, “in particular getting praise (biaoyang) from teachers and respect from peers” (p. 174). Children at Biyu are keen to please authorities, which causes socializers to worry. Punishments and rewards for bad and good conduct are usually immaterial, but no less significant for that reason. A particularly precious honour is to be appointed to serve as the “little class head” (xiao banzhang) for the day, which involves both the responsibility and the privilege to give approval to class-mates for things like standing up and going to the potty (p. 183). Xu notes the “taste of power” class heads enjoy in this position, and the tattling that is one possible unintended consequence (p. 183). The ethnography is highly suggestive: the micro-dynamics of disciplinary and exemplary governing techniques such as this, i.e. appointing officials, are generated by and generative of the very social order that has intensified the concern for and anxiety over moral socialization in the first place.

The Good Child is, however, not only a study of the dilemmas of moral education in a time of moral crisis. Xu argues for attending to the creativity and agency of the children, and concludes that children are “constructing their own moral universe” (p. 192, see also p. 7). I think more could have been done to sharpen and strengthen this line of argument, so as to specify in greater detail the nature of this “agency,” embedded as it in social relationships and the micro-politics of recognition. An idea that could have been developed further is something Xu identifies as children's own “heuristics of social interactions” (p. 147), which only appears in one chapter but maybe could have informed the main argument.

Xu's ethnographic material reminds me of anthropologist Daniel Miller's essay, “How infants grow mothers in North London” (in Consuming Motherhood, Rutgers University Press, 2004). There are some cases of children “teaching” the adults something, for instance, that the old beggar on the street deserves a little donation even if he is a liar (pp. 91–92), or of children being so oblivious to status hierarchies that lower ranked staff members are included in the distribution of cake and candies (pp. 126–27, 146). While some instances of creativity may provoke worries about the vulnerability of the pure child in a society of calculators and cheats, they might also reinvigorate belief in the old teaching from the Three Characters Classic (San zi jing): “people at birth are naturally good” (ren zhi chu, xing ben shan), providing a glimmer of hope for the future of society, a major concern for the author herself.

In sum, The Good Child is an achievement. As a reader firmly situated in the field of anthropology, I would have liked to see more discussion of the child-rearing practices described by Biyu parents as class-based practices and of the governing techniques deployed by the preschool as forms of discipline (in the Foucauldian sense). But this is a work of “cross-fertilization,” a rare endeavour and without doubt a very successful one. Psychological constructs are challenged and the notion of moral domains complicated, while methods from experimental psychology have greatly enriched the ethnography. We have here a vivid account of a preschool community in 21st-century Shanghai, and a miniaturization of society itself, to be read and discussed from multiple angles.