The first generation of children born under China’s one-child family policy is now reaching adulthood. What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the government’s decision to accelerate the fertility transition.

Only Hope shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.

Vanessa Fong (PhD,Harvard)is an anthropologist interested in how the experiences of a now partly transnational cohort of Chinese only-children and their families shed light on theories of gender, citizenship, transnationalism, migration, education, and demographic, medical, and psychological anthropology.

Her research focuses on a cohort of youth who attended the Chinese junior high and high schools where she conducted her initial fieldwork (1997–2000). Almost all members of this cohort were born under China's one-child policy, which began in 1979. She is in the early phases of a longitudinal project that follows members of this cohort throughout the course of their lives. The first phase of this project focused on how members of the cohort experienced adolescence, and was based on participant observation in schools and homes as well as on a survey of 2,273 junior high and high school students. The current phase of this project examines how members of the cohort are dealing with two kinds of life-changing processes: marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing; and study abroad in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and North America. Future phases of this project will examine how members of the cohort (in China and abroad) negotiate cultural, national, and political identities; make decisions about fertility; raise children of their own; deal with physical and psychological health issues; and try to provide economic support and medical and nursing care for their aging parents and grandparents.She is also collaborating with psychologists and sociologists on a project in Nanjing, China, examining relationships between parents' socioeconomic trajectories, parenting beliefs and practices, and child development among 414 families with infants and 710 families with adolescents.