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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research with Shanghai families, this paper examines how sending children to UK boarding schools reshapes care, family relations, and responsibilities, showing how education-migration reproduces anxiety through aspiration, outsourcing of care, and obligation under neo-familism.

Paper long abstract

Amid the entanglement of neoliberal, socialist, and Confucian value systems, Chinese urban middle-class families face increasing pressure to manage educational risk through private investment. Education has become a central site through which families pursue social mobility, security, and moral responsibility, not only for the child, but for the family as a collective unit. While international education is often imagined as a more relaxed and “happy” childhood, this paper demonstrates growing disillusionment with the costs, intensity, and emotional labour involved in acquiring elite schooling.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research (2019–2023) with wealthy urban families in Shanghai, this paper examines transnational educational strategies through which children are sent to elite UK boarding schools from as early as age 11. These arrangements involve the outsourcing of daily care to schools, guardianship agencies, and institutional infrastructures, reshaping parent–child relationships and redistributing familial responsibilities across borders. Building on Yan Yunxiang’s concept of neo-familism, the paper introduces the notion of "transnational neo-familism" to analyse how ideals of parental sacrifice, obligation, and love travel and are reconfigured through education migration.

The paper argues families navigate an intricate synthesis of care, aspiration, anxiety, and moral obligation. Educational anxieties are further intensified by processes of social and infrastructural involution, as families encounter diminishing returns within the very systems they hoped would provide escape from hyper-competition.

The paper contributes to debates on education, family transformation, and affective labour, showing how global educational pathways reproduce, rather than resolve, anxieties about the future.

Keywords: Chinese family, elite education, UK boarding schools, neo-familism