One of the most dramatic and noticeable changes in China since the introduction of economic and social reforms in the early 1980s has been the mass migration of peasants from the countryside to urban areas across the country. Murphy's in-depth fieldwork in rural China offers a rich basis for her findings about the impact of migration on many aspects of rural life: inequality; the organization of agricultural production; land transfers; livelihood diversification; spending patterns; house-building; marriage; education; the position of women; social stability; and state-society relations. Her analysis focuses on the human experiences and strategies that precipitate shifts in national and local policies for economic development, and the responses of migrants, non-migrants, and officials to changing circumstances, obstacles and opportunities. This pioneering study is rich in original source materials and anecdotes, as well as useful, comparative examples from other developing countries.

The all-embracing discourse of population quality (suzhi) is put to work through rural primary schools in ways that help state institutions implement policies such as accelerating demographic transition, restructuring the education system, professionalizing labour markets, promoting agricultural skills training, instituting economic liberalism and carrying out patriotic education. Suzhi discourse facilitates policy implementation in four ways. First, it imbues disparate policies with seeming coherence. Secondly, by articulating a diverse set of policies through suzhi discourse, including state retreat from welfare provisioning, state institutions can be seen to be working to improve people's well-being. Thirdly, in making people responsible for raising their own quality, the need to improve suzhi is an explanation and a prescription when individuals are adversely affected by policies. Finally, suzhi discourse encourages individuals to regulate their conduct in accordance with the political drift of society. By enfolding suzhi norms into identity formation, the education system shapes each individual's ongoing process of “becoming” in ways that parallel the nation's modernization, thereby reducing the costs of policy enforcement.

This article draws on a survey conducted in six provinces in summer 2008 to investigate the determinants of son preference in rural China. The analysis confirms the conventional wisdom that son preference is embedded within patrilineal family structures and practices. We extend our analysis by exploring specific aspects of variation within patrilineal family culture. We find that the patrilineal group (clan) composition of villages and family participation in practices such as building ancestral halls and updating genealogies significantly influence son preference. Yet even though son preference is embedded within patrilineal family culture, our analysis suggests that over time the attenuation of son preference is likely. This is because determinants associated with socioeconomic change—for instance, higher levels of education, direct exposure to official policy education materials, higher income (a proxy for rural industrialization), and agricultural mechanization—all attenuate son preference. Being younger and female are also associated with weaker son preference, and both characteristics are likely to interact with education and industrialization to further dilute son preference in the longer term. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that concerted efforts are needed to ameliorate institutional discrimination against rural people in welfare provisioning and in labor markets, and to promote multiple dimensions of gender equality, including in land rights, wage rates, and education.

This essay draws on an original cross‐sectional survey of 1,010 children and their guardians in highly migratory regions of Anhui and Jiangxi provinces located in China's interior. It uses propensity score matching, a technique that mitigates endogenity, to examine the impact of parental migration and post‐migration guardianship arrangements on the children's educational performance as measured by test scores for Chinese and mathematics. One core finding is that the educational performance of children is adversely affected by parental migration only when both parents migrate or when a non‐parent guardian is the principal carer. Additionally, longer durations of parental absence are associated with poorer educational performance. The migration of two parents only significantly adversely affects the educational performance of boys. There is no significant effect on the educational performance of girls. On the basis of our findings we argue that rather than support left‐behind children within the countryside, the long‐term policy response should be to remove the institutional obstacles that prevent family resettlement in the cities.

Anthropometric measures of body fat appear to provide as consistent estimates of KF decline risk as CT measures in elders.