Love's Uncertainty

"Love's Uncertainty explores the hopes and anxieties of urban, middle-class parents in contemporary China. Combining long-term ethnographic research with textual analyses of popular childrearing manuals, television dramas, and government documents, the author describes the mundane dilemmas of ordinary Chinese parents, who struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with the reality of competing for limited resources. Situating their experiences in the historical context of state efforts to 'improve population quality,' this account reveals how global transformations articulate with the most intimate of human experiences. Ultimately, the book offers a meditation on the nature of moral agency in following how people, amidst the myriad contingencies of life, try to discern the boundary between what can and cannot be controlled"--Provided by publisher.