Susanne Bregnbӕk (2016): Fragile Elites. The Dilemmas of China’s Top University StudentsMarius Meinhof

ASIEN – Nr. 143 (2017) pp. 136–38

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 184 S., 24,95 EUR

Susanne Bregnbӕk’s book Fragile Elites asks a series of highly pertinent questions about the role of China’s new elites: how elite students experience the pressure they are exposed to, and how they negotiate the tensions between their biographical expectations, their parents and the government. It tries to understand Chinese elite students’ struggles as an oedipal project on the “separation from the will of the parents and, by extension, the will of the state” (p. 4). It therefore approaches a topic highly evident in Chinese student life that must urgently be debated in China studies to understand areas such as youth, family, middle class and political culture…