The Lonely Generation: Unraveling China’s Population Crisis After the One-Child Policy is an engaging book that draws on rich qualitative and quantitative data to offer important new insights about factors driving demographic changes in China.

Vanessa L. Fong, Amherst College

Ting Wang has made a profoundly important contribution to our understanding of a puzzle: given China’s loosening of birth restrictions, why are its fertility rates continuing to plummet to the lowest levels ever seen? Through meticulous survey and interview research, she discovers that much like its neighbors, China elevated women’s educational status while actively punishing them for the aspirations that naturally derive from it. China has openly dashed the hopes of its women through brazen discrimination within its neoliberal but patriarchal economy, while at the same time planning to use them instrumentally for pro-natalist aims. The iron-jawed defiance of Chinese women to be so used is a testament that there will either rise a new China more conducive to women, or there won’t be a China at all in the future.

Valerie M. Hudson, University Distinguished Professor and holder of the George H. W. Bush Chair, Texas A&M University

The Lonely Generation: Unraveling China’s Population Crisis After the One-Child Policy offers an insightful analysis of the intersection of history, culture, politics, and social norms in the construction of gender relations in contemporary China. Through a mixed-method approach incorporating data analysis and interviews, the author provides an answer to the puzzling questions of why China’s birth rates remain so low despite the lifting of its restrictive population policies and why the country’s increased economic growth has been accompanied by a decline in women’s empowerment. The book will be of interest to demographers, political scientists, sociologists, and anyone seeking to understand the precariousness of China’s geopolitical rise.

Andrea den Boer, University of Kent