Unique in Jing Xu's The Good Child is her measured and meticulous ethnography in a Shanghai private preschool between 2011 and 2012, the first of its kind to examine how parents and teachers socialize young children in the escalating conflicts between Chinese morality and modernity. The immediate context of this study is Biyu Preschool, which serves well-to-do families in the Pudong District of Shanghai, a financial rival of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The moral life in Biyu reflects the moral uncertainty, tensions, and crises in society, a salient message from Xu's well-organized report of the results of participant observation, surveys, and experiments.

In this book, Xu describes her research on Chinese morality at Biyu Preschool as an effort to reengage the new field of moral anthropology with recent developments in psychology. By so doing, she hopes to “redress this critical disconnect between anthropology and psychology in studying the emergence of different prosocial dispositions in specific cultural dynamics” (p. 6). Her use of mixed methods provides an example of her effectively addressing this disconnect. The research centers on how the Confucian notion of zuoren or “acting human” plays out in young children's upbringing in contemporary Shanghai.

Chapter 1 depicts parents’ aspirations in rearing young moral persons while also experiencing anxiety and cynicism. Such mixed parental perceptions contextualize chapters 2 through 4, where preschoolers are scrutinized as socialized moral characters. Xu first examines the cultivation of young children's empathy, a concept conveyed in the words of the Chinese philosopher Mencius around 300 BCE: “everyone has the heart that cannot see others to suffer” (p. 75). Then, she analyzes preschoolers’ conflicts over the ownership of property and fair distribution in Biyu. Similarly, children's selfishness, generosity, and reciprocity are explored through interviews or experiments. These and other topics across the chapters appear disparate, but careful reading shows that they converge on the central notion of zuoren. These results emerge through the copious and fine-grained analysis of participants’ interactions and relationships.

Chapter 5 is the most engaging for the reader. Extensive field notes highlight the complexity of the Chinese parenting approach used to instill zuoren. Xu describes this approach as guanjiao (subjecting one's child to discipline), possibly a variant of guan.Footnote ¹ Although Xu uses the word “tension” throughout the book, she focuses the reader's attention in chapter 5 on tension in the needs and contradictions of practicing guanjiao in a post-industrial, market-driven, and highly competitive Shanghai. Members of families and social institutions are all tied to one another through multiple moral threads and social webs, some pulling, some being pulled, and some being knotted. Parents’ cultural consensus from the past about how to practice guanjiao confronts today's emerging and sometimes contradicting values. The vicissitudes of morality in Chinese modernity baffles parents and teachers alike. Modernity challenges them with sticky moral dilemmas and plunges them into a swirl of moral crises. Nearly thirty pages of participants’ narratives in this chapter offer a variety of cultural texts for readers to analyze and interpret. Xu's evidence suggests that it has become increasingly difficult to bring up moral children in Shanghai. The moral crises people have experienced hamper and even damage the Confucian idealism to instill zuoren in the young.

Although the book touches on various modern Chinese interpretations of zuoren, it bypasses the deep-rooted Confucian philosophy of familial filial piety that is rarely discussed in Western moral philosophy and psychology. This cultural root carries in itself moral tensions and dilemmas. For example, the Analects of Confucius records a dialogue between a duke and Confucius about what a son should do if his father stole a sheep: conceal or divulge it? Confucius's answer was that the priority of the son's filial duty was to cover up the fact.Footnote ² Mencius had a similar response to a hypothetical murder case. After a father committed a murder, his son, who was a government official, should run away with his father rather than allowing his father to be punished.Footnote ³ This Confucian philosophy of zuoren embodies the core value of filial piety in the family, which has been complex, entangling, and crisis-prone in Chinese life for two thousand years.

It is by no means a small feat to bring the complex topic of moral socialization in Chinese early childhood into a thesis that is sophisticated in organization, adventurous in method, and fine-grained in analysis. Xu's study provides a map for future research in this area, and this methodologic adventure can inspire graduate students who are interested in making good use of mixed methods in fieldwork.