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Children in China is a beautifully produced paperback with high quality stock and typeface. For the older reader, it is easy on the eye and comfortable in the hand, which is helpful because reading this comprehensive text demands prolonged attention to complicated results of myriad sociocultural research projects. In six chapters, introduction, and conclusion, the author Orna Naftali, lecturer in Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, skilfully marshals the evidence for her opinions, referring widely to Chinese government and independent research statistics, going well beyond her own research with her Chinese collaborator, Yang Junhong, and yet also zeroing in on direct speech from individual interviews with Chinese children. Her views on the lives and aspirations of Chinese children are firmly embedded in her understanding of the series of changes in China since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. She usefully prepares the reader with a chronology, from which the stand-outs to me are the Great Leap Forward in industrialisation in 1958, the introduction of the one-child policy for population control in 1978, and the education for quality reform plan in 1999. Written in 2016, the book cannot be expected to encompass the current level of transformation in China, the tightening of controls, and the amazing decision that each family should now have two children. How sad for families that would have wanted more but are now infertile; how sad for the state that others for whom it is now possible, have seen the benefits of a reduced financial burden and prefer to focus all resources on a single child.
Psychotherapists will not find much psychoanalytic sensibility in these pages, at least not from a European Freud- or Jung-centred approach to individual analysis. But they will find their in-depth understanding of Chinese children and their families greatly enriched by the author's breadth of knowledge of the impact of China's rapid modernisa