Mobilising China’s One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism and Youth Militarisation in the PRC

Drawing on a wide variety of Chinese-language publications and in-depth interviews with high-school students, Mobilising China’s One-Child Generation provides systematic evidence of the spread of martial logic and techniques into Chinese schools. The book explores how China has implemented Patriotic Education (PE) and National Defence Education (NDE) programmes to foster love for the nation and the Party-state, mobilise the population to fight modern wars in the information age, and encourage youth to join the army. It studies how these programmes present the tropes of war and the military to youth, and how they are related to shifting constructions of gender and the national collectivity. It also documents students’ varied perceptions-and notably contestations-of this militarised ethos, complicating our understanding of popular nationalism and militarisation processes in this authoritarian global power.

Orna Naftali holds the Abraham Miller Chair in Chinese Studies and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.