A recurrent theme in scholarship on Chinese societies is the parent–child relationship as a prototype of social relations, including the sovereign–subject relationship. However, the analogy between parent–child and state–citizen relationships is typically understood in an abstract sense. Naftali's recent book, Children, Rights and Modernity in China, is a novel endeavour that aims to make explicit such association and to substantiate it with up-to-date empirical evidence.

The goal of this book is two-fold: to chart the recent changes in children's rights in China and to bring together adult–child and state–citizen relationships as different facets of the same changes. Naftali opens her discussion by foregrounding the intimate link between the governing of the young and China's modernization process in the 20th century. The special socioeconomic configurations of post-socialist China that promote children's individual rights – such as the one-child policy and the neo-liberal market system – are contextualized in an overall, global shift towards children's improving rights.

A concise review of the legislative changes regarding children's rights in the PRC, as well as quotes from contemporary Chinese media and academia, demonstrate China's full embrace of this global transformation. The willing acceptance of children's rights to free expression and independent thinking is visible in the revised pedagogical materials and methods in Shanghai schools and new family practices, especially among the younger cohorts of teachers and mothers who aim to bring up a generation of confident, enterprising and self-regulating citizens. Such willingness is also embodied with respect to children's privacy and physical integrity: the granting of children's personal space has become commonplace in the family; the breaching of the students’ privacy through public shaming is gradually ceasing, thanks to administrative orders and professional training given to teachers. Shanghai teachers and caregivers, while not necessarily consistent in attitudes and behaviour, are increasingly aware of children's rights to be protected from physical harm and less accepting of corporal punishment. Young Shanghai mothers, in particular, encourage their children to assert their rights using legal lexicon.

Such changes, as Naftali argued, marks the emerging “civility” in contemporary China that recognizes children as “distinct, autonomous individuals” entitled to own their own space, privacy and body. This new attitude is supported by the trending psychologized discourse on human development, as exemplified by the implementation of age-appropriate teaching materials and the growing attention to students’ emotional well-being in Shanghai schools, and the consumption of parenting advice literature among young, middle-class Shanghai mothers.

While acknowledging these changes, Naftali points out that Shanghai teachers’ and mothers’ willingness to grant more rights to experience a “happy” “carefree” childhood clashes with anxiety about children's prospects in the fiercely competitive neo-liberal market economy, thereby generating much ambivalence and hesitation. The rising recognition of children's rights is also difficult to reconcile with the Chinese tradition of filial piety, which stresses children's obligations rather than rights. Fuelled by a mixture of rationalization and sentiments, and encouraged by governmental campaigns, Shanghai teachers and caregivers continue to value filial piety (albeit an attenuated form of it) as an effective means to prevent negative child development, to restore proper social order, and to anchor their own cultural identity. Naftali optimistically contends that the changing views on children's individual rights – although still confined to better developed areas of China and among the middle-class with relatively high “quality” – will eventually extend to a broader population and penetrate into the citizen–state relationship through the empowered youngsters of today's China.

Naftali's book sheds new light on China's on-going social changes from the perspective of children's rights. Drawing on vivid ethnographic evidence, Naftali's snapshots elucidate the changing discourse and practices of children's rights in both the private (family) and the public space (school). The employment of the concept of habitus, the juxtaposition of the “rights talk” regarding children's welfare alongside China's quality (suzhi) discourse, and the intersection of changes in children's rights and China's gender and social inequality, make her argument rich, nuanced and insightful.

One problem in Naftali's argument, however, is that she analyses children's rights as a monolithic entirety instead of a cluster of qualitatively different components. The seemingly ambivalent attitude and contradictory behaviour of Shanghai teachers and caregivers might actually reflect the divergent, if not conflicting, nature of these components (e.g. the right to development to full potential versus the right to enough sleep and leisure). Similarly, a separate conceptualization of rights and obligations as two intertwined yet independent dimensions would better explain the paradox of the “revisiting filial child” (e.g. a caregiver can willingly grant her child more rights but expect more from the child at the same time). This book could be further strengthened by bringing in more evidence to bridge children's rights and the right of adult citizens, an idea that is suggested rather than substantiated in the text, and more extensive discussions on the legal rights of other vulnerable groups in China.