This book offers an in-depth examination of how family background shapes inequalities in children’s academic performance and cognitive skill development in China. It further identifies key mediating mechanisms—including living arrangements, family investments, parenting practices, and private tutoring—that help explain how these disparities emerge and persist.

While repeated cross-sectional data are valuable for examining macro-level social changes over time, they are inherently limited in their ability to capture individual-level dynamics and identify underlying causal mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, sociologists of China have increasingly turned to the rich, high-quality longitudinal data provided by the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), launched in 2010, to investigate social and economic inequality across multiple levels and domains. The essays in this volume draw exclusively on CFPS data and collectively examine how families shape children’s educational attainment, highlighting a range of intervening pathways. Together, these studies provide a coherent and empirically rigorous understanding of the mechanisms through which family background contributes to educational inequality in contemporary China.

This book will be an important resource for researchers and academics of Chinese sociology and demography. The articles were originally published in various issues of Chinese Sociological Review, accompanied by a new Introduction.