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This chapter examines the trend in school enrollment and transitions to senior high school and to college in China for selected young cohorts since the 1990s, based on the analyses of the sample data from population censuses in 1990 and 2000 and the mini-census in 2005. We pay particular attention to educational inequality based on gender and the household registration system (hukou) in the context of educational expansion. Results show a substantial increase in educational opportunities over time at all levels. In particular, women have gained relatively more; gender inequality has decreased over time, and the gap in college enrollments was even reversed to favor women in 2005. However, rural–urban inequality was enlarged in the 1990s. The educational expansion has mainly benefited females and urban residents.

This research aims at explaining the phenomenon of the “black children” (heihaizi), a very little-known generation who lived with concealment under the one-child policy in China. The one-child policy was officially introduced to nationwide at the end of 1979 by permitting per couple to have one child only, later modified to a second child allowed if the first was a girl in rural China in 1984. It was officially replaced by a nation-wide two-child policy and most existing research focused on the parents’ sufferings and policy changes. The term “black children” has been mainly used to describe their absence from their family hukou registration and education. However, this research aims at expanding the meaning of being “black” to explain the children who were concealed more than at the level of family formal registration, but also physical freedom and emotional bond. What we do not yet know are the details of their lived experiences from a day-to-day base: where did they live? How were they raised up? Who were involved? Who benefited from it and who did not? In this way, this research challenges the existing scholarship on the one-child policy and repositions the “black children” as primary victims, and reveals the family as a key figure in co-producing their diminished status with the support of state power. It is very important to understand these children’s loss of citizenship and human freedom from the inside of the family because they were concealed in so many ways away from public view and interventions. This research focuses on illustrating how their lack of access to continued, stabilized, and reciprocally recognized family interactions framed their very idea of self-worth and identity.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes how various gender discourses transmitted through mass media such as television form discourse competition and conflict today as China is confronting cultural globalization. In that context, a wave of consumerism and nostalgia for cultural tradition become two of the key factors that shield patriarchy and resist feminism.

Method – Quantitative and qualitative responses of Chinese university students to video productions from South Korea and the United States are studied, compared, and contrasted by using survey and focus group discussion methods.

Findings – Women and men students show preference for different types of televised and film entertainment. Both respond to the gender discourses depicted, seeing in them models for behavior and fashion. The independence and sexual freedom reflected in TV series from the United States is seen by many as less applicable to the Chinese context than the idealized traditionalism of the Korean series.

Social implications – Global culture provides alternative and competing gender discourses, which can lead to social change or to nostalgia for an idealized tradition in the face of change. To the extent that both women and men adopt the male gaze, patriarchal culture is strengthened, not challenged in the process.