The Children of China's Great Migration fills an important gap in the growing English-language literature on rural children who have at least one parent migrating without them to cities for work. It departs from the urban-centric public discourse that paints a “dismal picture” of left-behind children. By giving voice to children about their experiences and perspectives, it offers critically a nuanced sociological study that highlights the sense of responsibility and reciprocity that bond three generations together despite geographic distance and emotional challenges.

Rachel Murphy insightfully uses the term “striving team” to describe China's multilocal multi-generational families, in which parents, children and grandparents work collectively on realizing aspirations for a better life. Chapter three delineates the “parent–child striving team” as a “social institution,” in which not only parents and grandparents but also schools actively socialize children into internalizing the logic of meritocracy, filial piety and urban superiority. To study hard and succeed in the examination system is to reciprocate parents’ sacrifice, to avoid their path of dagong (laborious migrant work), and ultimately to bring the family out of rural poverty and inferiority. Children's own accounts show the mixed effects of such moralistic teaching at both home and school. Although many are incentivized to endure long hours of repetitive drilling and achieve academic success, others suffer from the pressure and feel frustrated.

This book draws on interviews conducted in four counties in two major migrant-sending provinces (Anhui and Jiangxi) between 2010 and 2011 as well as follow-up interviews with 25 of the children and their caregivers between 2013 and 2015. This offers a glimpse of how family dynamics and children's lives evolved over time. Survey findings in two townships in each of the fieldwork counties and observation during fieldwork are also used for contextualization. Chapter two provides brief information of the four counties, all of which offer limited off-farm jobs and consequently have a high percentage of labour emigration to coastal cities and even abroad. It highlights how families’ migration patterns and childcare strategies vary in response to local school regimes. In counties where boarding primary and middle schools are available, rural parents opt for them especially because of close supervision by teachers. Ironically, the preference for boarding school perpetuates labour migration to generate remittances and pay expensive boarding fees. In contrast, families in poorer regions with few boarding options rely on grandparents or stay-behind parent to provide childcare and supervision. Yet the difficulties facing aging grandparents are visible and clearly felt by themselves. This reminds us how China's structural rural–urban disparity, especially in terms of educational resources that have been disproportionally concentrated in towns and cities, necessitates and almost demands parent–child separation among rural households and significantly hinders children's life chances via education.

In addition to place, gender is the other key concept around which the second half of the book is structured. Chapter four asks whether boys and girls receive resources and do chores differently. Both quantitative and qualitative data show that gendered differentiation is less pronounced and more mutable than expected in everyday childcare, educational investment, and distribution of pocket money and household chores. This confirms recent scholarship on the decrease of son preference amid demographic changes and socioeconomic development after three decades of family planning and labour migration. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the gender-based perceptions about the roles and needs of males and females remain salient in migration patterns, family relations, and children's experiences and self-identification. Chapters five, six and seven zoom in onto “mother-stay-behind,” “father-stay-behind” and “skipped-generation” families respectively. Parents and children are socialized in the traditional cultural model of “stern father nurturing mother” and hence normalize the mother-stay-behind arrangement. Most children appreciate the comforts bestowed by their mother's presence. They recognize the sacrifices their mothers make to shoulder both physical work and emotional burdens at home. In comparison, the father-stay-behind configuration is widely perceived as exceptional and children's relationships with parents tend to be more complicated and sometimes difficult. The prevailing gender norms signal father-stay-behind families’ vulnerability so that children need different strategies, such as keeping silent about their mothers’ absence, relying on grandmothers and cherishing any affection from their fathers, to cope with such abnormal arrangements. Noticeably, fathers who fail to make economic provision are at more risk of losing emotional closeness and respect from their children because of the gender norm. When both parents migrate often due to poverty, paternal grandparents are expected to take on childcaring responsibilities because of the dominant patrilineal system in which descent is traced through male lines.

Murphy's book carefully avoids simplistic causal analysis by paying meticulous attention to the intersection of multiple factors that contribute to children's experiences and perceptions throughout the chapters. It also demonstrates rigorous scholarship that places the experiences of Chinese left-behind children in the larger context of scholarship about migration and family relations around the world. This book will be of great value to China scholars and graduate students who are interested in migration, education, childhood, family and gender issues.