TATTLING WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS 1 Tattling with Chinese Characteristics: Norm Sensitivity, Moral Anxiety, and “The Genuine Child” Jing Xu Abstract Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, this article examines Chinese preschool children’s tattling behavior as well as educators’ interpretations of it. Tattling is defined as the re- porting to an authority figure of other children’s counternormative behavior. My research revealed distinctive characteristics of tattling in the Chinese context: the popularity of third-party (bystander) instead of second-party (victim) tattling, the entanglement between tattling and pleasing authority, and adults’ moralistic concerns about tattlers’ motivations and character, encapsulated in the discourse of “the genuine child.” I further contextualized adults’ concerns in widespread moral anxiety in a changing Chinese society and connected them to historical notions of childhood and morality. Taken together, these findings illuminate cultural influences on children’s everyday sociomoral life in light of the continuities and changes of Chinese conceptualizations of “the child.” This article facilitates conversations between anthropology and psychology and demonstrates valuable linkages between psychological anthropology and Chinese studies. [tattling, morality, childhood, anxiety, China] Introduction It was a late afternoon in a Shanghai preschool classroom when children were getting ready to head home. These five-year-olds were chatting joyfully with candies in their hands, candies they got from participating in a game I played with them. 1 Teacher Mei announced to the whole class: “Put away your candies now. Let’s get ready to leave school.” Several children, however, were still playing with the treats. Suddenly, Xinxin stood up and reported: “Teacher Mei, Nana didn’t put away her candies,” hinting that the teacher should enforce her rule. I was surprised at this scene, especially given that Nana was Xinxin’s friend. After the children left for home, Teacher Mei told me that Xinxin liked to tattle (gaozhuang), and he was an unpleasant tattler: “He is a scheming and calculating (you xinyan) child. He did not participate in your game and did not get a candy, so he was jealous of those who got a candy. Average children wouldn’t expose and denounce (jiefa) other children, especially their friends.” During my fieldwork in a middle-class preschool community in Shanghai, China, I observed many incidents of children reporting to their teachers about other children’s “bad behaviors,” from minor violations of class rules, such as not sitting properly, to more severe transgressions, such as hitting others. I also gathered comments from teachers on such incidents, mainly negative, occasionally positive or neutral, depending on the specific situation and the children involved. In many cases, like in Xinxin’s story, teachers would complain that the reporter was not motivated by a genuine concern for restoring justice or defending class rules but instead was driven by self-interest, thus the child was scheming or calculating (you xinyan, xinji). ETHOS, Vol. 00, Issue 0, pp. 1–21, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C  2020 by the American Anthropological Association All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12262