The “Only Hope”: China’s One-Child Generation in the Context of Modernization

China was the first country in the world to explicitly implement a one-child policy by means of its National Administrative Directive. Nourished by Confucianism, Chinese people attach great importance to the continuation of the bloodline and consider “many children and many blessings” as a symbol of a happy family. Due to the rapid modernization of Chinese society after the period of reform and “opening up,” the one-child generation has figured as a central feature of this social acceleration. Children are also commonly characterized as the “only hope” of their parents for continuation of their families. In this article, we use the generation of “only children” in China (born in 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s), as a case study to explore the hopes and emotions of Chinese families in the context of modernization. We focus on the following aspects by comparing theories related to hope, especially Fei Xiaotong’s family theory and Bloch’s theory of concrete utopia: (a) the change in the paradigm of family-centered hope from traditional China to the modern society; (b) the context of modernization in which the Chinese one-child generation grows up and becomes the hope for the future of the Chinese family and society; and (c) the new challenges encountered by the one-child generation, and by the hopes of the family and society, in terms of the continuity of cultural inheritance.