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1Liu Jieyu’s Embedded Generations sets itself a deceptively simple task: to ask what has changed in Chinese family life across three generations, and what has endured. However, drawing on life-history interviews with urban and rural families spanning the Mao and post-Mao eras, Liu challenges the “linear story” often told by modernisation and individualisation theories, in which Chinese families are imagined as moving steadily from duty to love, and from collective family responsibility to autonomous individual choice. Against this narrative, Liu develops the concept of “embedded generation.” Family practices, Liu argues, are not linear. Instead, they are embedded in the institutional context of their time, transmitted and renegotiated between generations, and unevenly adapted by individuals whose capacities differ by gender, class, and location. As a result, modernisation in contemporary Chinese society could “de-traditionalise as much as re-traditionalise family life” (p. 112) because the downward flow of intergenerational resources does not necessarily signal declining parental authority.

2The book’s first major strength lies in its empirical architecture. Methodologically, the book draws on 260 life-history narratives gathered from three generations of urban and rural families across six fieldwork sites, complemented by ethnographic observation. Across chapters on growing up, marriage, sexual life, grandparenting, and elder care, Liu allows the same families to reappear (e.g., a courtship decision in one chapter becomes an old-age care arrangement later in the book; a childhood experience helps explain a later attitude towards marriage or caregiving). This design enables us to treat family life as a connected system rather than as a sequence of isolated themes. Rather than reproducing the familiar opposition between arranged and free-choice marriage, this book shows that “negotiated marriage” (p. 85) better captures the experiences of all three generations. Even the seemingly autonomous urban only-child exercises what Liu calls “obedient autonomy,” (p. 70) a form of freedom made possible by having first internalised parental expectations. This is precisely the kind of finding that a multigenerational design can produce.

3Second, this book shows how family practices are shaped by institutions. Chapter 4, “The Old Caring for the Young” on grandparenting makes this point with particular clarity. For example, grandparental childcare in China did not simply survive as a timeless cultural tradition. It became a social norm through a specific institutional configuration: the near-universal full-time employment of urban women, early and gender-differentiated retirement ages, limited public childcare, and the hukou (household registration) system’s shaping of rural family strategies. The same chapter further characterises China’s welfare regime as “residual,” (p. 175) one that places primary responsibility on the family while assigning the state a “residual function.” She also notes that legislation and propaganda have continued to reinforce old-age support as “a duty grounded in assumed natural feelings” (p. 225). Here, Liu reinforces the argument that the state does not merely provide the institutional backdrop for family responsibility, but also organises the moral language through which family responsibility is understood.

4Third, this book points out a key theoretical paradox that policy change does not automatically translate into reproductive freedom. As mentioned in this book, after the 2016 Two-child policy, only around 6% of couples in big cities opted for a second child, and a national survey found that 86.5% of families cited the unavailability of a carer as the main impediment. Whether grandparents were willing to help determined whether the policy translated into births. One daughter, accidentally pregnant, carries the pregnancy to term only after hiring two live-in nannies; another, without willing kin support, chooses abortion. These cases reveal a crucial paradox: expanding permission to have children, without expanding childcare infrastructure or redistributing domestic labour, may intensify pressure rather than enlarge freedom.

5If there is one area where I would have liked the book to go further, it is in theorising the state as an active demographic actor. Liu is highly attentive to institutional context, yet in the chapters on courtship, intimacy, and fertility, the state sometimes appears more as an institutional context than as a wilful agent with a population agenda. This matters particularly in the post-2021 Three-child era, when childbearing has increasingly been reframed through the language of national need and demographic crisis. The “residual-state” model is valuable because it explains the structural vacuum into which families are pushed. The analysis could be extended by asking how policy itself produces moral expectations, especially for women. Specifically, how does pronatalist discourse turn reproductive decisions into matters of social responsibility?

6Additionally, Embedded Generations is attentive to gender throughout, but masculinity functions as a structural position (namely, the “breadwinner”), rather than as an object of analysis in its own right. The men of the book provide money, yet the hands-on and emotional labour of care defaults to mothers, daughters, and daughters-in-law. Liu mentions the observation that mothers across all three generations form closer family bonds than men because men “invested insufficiently in the ‘emotional bank’” (p. 214), thereby receiving lower-quality care in old age. I believe the book’s theoretical depth would be significantly enhanced by a deeper analysis of why men contribute so little emotionally within the family, and by considering how men in contemporary China understand, construct, practice, and even resist masculinity within the context of encouraging childbirth.

7Nevertheless, none of this should obscure the book’s achievement. There is no “perfect” work, but this book does a good job of showing the changes in Chinese families over the past century within the word limit. Methodologically, its use of family genealogies and photos of rural housing to support its arguments is also worth referencing and emulating. Its great contribution is to show that Chinese family change cannot be understood through a simple movement from tradition to modernity, or from family obligation to individual choice. Family life is made within institutions and reworked under unequal conditions. Liu gives scholars a vocabulary for studying that process. The next task is to carry this vocabulary into the politics of the Three-child era, into the study of reproductive pressure, and into a more explicit analysis of the man as “breadwinner” whose role is not only assumed but constructed. Overall, Embedded Generations is essential reading for anyone engaged in research related to family, population, gender, and sociology.