Urban daughters have benefited from the demographic pattern produced by China's one–child policy. In the system of patrilineal kinship that has long characterized most of Chinese society, parents had little incentive to invest in their daughters. Singleton daughters, however, enjoy unprecedented parental support because they do not have to compete with brothers for parental investment. Low fertility enabled mothers to get paid work and, thus, gain the ability to demonstrate their filiality by providing their own parents with financial support. Because their mothers have already proven that daughters can provide their parents with old age support, and because singletons have no brothers for their parents to favor, daughters have more power than ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms while using equivocal ones to their own advantage. [Keywords: gender, family, fertility, demography, China]

In this article I analyze longitudinal case studies of five Chinese families to account for the tensions underlying widespread Chinese discourses about the unsatisfactory personalities and behaviors of children born under China's one‐child policy. I argue that these tensions result from a mismatch between the simple values of excellence, independence, obedience, caring/sociableness that Chinese parents tell their children to abide by and the more complex, difficult‐to‐conceive, and difficult‐to‐articulate cultural models Chinese parents actually want their children to develop. This dissonance arises for a number of reasons: (1) The values at stake are often mutually contradictory; (2) Parents have difficulty identifying and articulating the situated cultural models they want their children to use to match values to contexts; (3) Children fail to understand and internalize the complex cultural models their parents want them to develop; and (4) Parents' desires to transmit their own cultural models to their children conflict with their desires for children to develop superior cultural models that would enable them to attain upward mobility. Chinese singletons' inability to meet their parents' expectations should thus be seen not merely as a result of the singleton status popular Chinese discourses often blamed for the younger generation's failings but also as a result of their status (shared with many other children worldwide) as rapidly developing children in a rapidly changing world. My findings suggest that studies of cultural models should pay more attention to discrepancies between verbal glosses and the conceptual complexity of the cultural models underlying them, and to the transformations that occur in the process of internalizing and integrating diverse sources of social information.

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In this article, I look at the apparent contradiction between Chinese teenagers' nationalism and their identification with a global imagined community that deemed China inferior. I examine how teenagers I knew in Dalian City, China, attempted to resolve this contradiction through the idiom of filial devotion, which they found more convincing than state‐sponsored discourses of nationalism that emphasized China's admirability. Despite their admiration for wealthier societies, they maintained a strong sense of filial nationalism, which they saw as analogous to their unconditional loyalty to their parents. Such nationalism could not be nullified by their disgust with China's low status in the capitalist world system.