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Friendships, an important form of people’s everyday relationships with others, have been studied by many scholars from different disciplines. However, there is limited research on friendship in the context of childhood, particularly that of Chinese rural children. This chapter presents findings from an in-depth study on Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of friendships with peers in the context of a rural primary boarding school. Data for this research were collected through an intensive five-month study, using an ethnographic approach, in a rural primary boarding school (given the pseudonym ‘Central Primary School’) in the western area of China in 2016. This chapter discusses parents’ influences on children’s selection of friends, particularly their ‘good’ friends, and their understandings of the functions of making friends in the context of rural China. It unpacks parents’ interventions on children’s friendships by discussing the moralised hierarchical relationship between children and their parents – children are expected to show obedience to parents. Then, it argues that the Confucian-collectivist values construct a relationship between a child’s individual achievement and their family’s collective good, which makes friendship not only an individual issue but also a collective one too.

This article verified the construct of servant leadership and validated a measure developed in Western culture. Results from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N=285) produced a five-factor model – altruistic calling, emotional healing, persuasive mapping, wisdom, and community stewardship with less items than the original measure. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N=304) indicated that the 5-factor servant leadership model fits the data best. Correlation analysis of the supervisor-subordinate paired sample (N=209 dyads) showed that servant leadership has more common features with transformational leadership and less with paternalistic leadership; the predictive power of servant leadership was roughly equivalent to that of transformational leadership but higher than that of paternalistic leadership when predicting criterion variables such as overall satisfaction and deviance behavior. Our results totally demonstrated that the revised servant leadership scale in Chinese culture has higher reliability and validity, which could be used for subsequent studies as an effective instrument.