In many discussions about education and development, one often encounters demands that sound reasonable but are made far too lightly—for example, telling parents that they should first “get themselves sorted out,” or insisting that teachers must always understand their students, as if complex problems would simply resolve themselves once the right attitude is adopted.
Such claims frequently overlook a key fact: adults, too, live within concrete social conditions and have very real limits to what they can endure. Some of the often-cited “success stories” of overseas Chinese families come from social environments across several generations that differ profoundly from those faced by most families in contemporary China. These differences cannot be erased by the single shared label of being “ethnically Chinese.”
