Post-reform China has witnessed a surge in ‘family education’ discourses in policy and public domains to guide and instruct parents to foster successful modern citizens. However, no research so far has systematically analysed these discourses and explored how they shape parents’ subjectivities and family-state relations in multi-ethnic, Western China. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this thesis explores the governing rationalities and technologies underlying family education discourses and parents’ (and grandparents’) practices of the self in their navigation of these discourses and the education system. Using the lens of educational governance of parents, the thesis combines macro and micro approaches to examine how parents’ subjectivities are constructed by state discourses and systems. I also analyse the recontextualisation of governing rationalities and technologies in specific settings by exploring how state discourses are accommodated and negotiated by local teachers. Through a critical discourse analysis of policies relating to education, family, and children, this thesis shows that improving parental suzhi constitutes political rationality to be realised through different governing technologies, including learning notions of parental responsibilities and children’s rights and scientific parenting knowledge and skills, and upholding socialist and zhonghua minzu traditional familial values. The Chinese term suzhi (Ch. 素质), although often translated as ‘human quality’, has a fuzzy and complicated meaning, involving connotations of civility, competence, and modernity. Thus, drawing on a cluster of international studies on the governance of parents and families, this thesis demonstrates how family education discourses in China constitute ‘a pedagogy of Chinese modernity’ through which parents are taught to learn Chinese modernity. In other words, the educational governance of parents operates through a pedagogy of Chinese modernity. Following these conceptualisations, the thesis empirically explores how local teachers, as the most important interface between the state and families, and local parents and grandparents in two communities, navigate the family education discourses and the education system. This micro-level empirical study is based in two ethnically different rural communities in Western China: one Han Chinese, and one Tibetan. In recent decades, the region has been targeted by various state-initiated development projects and modernisation discourses embodied by suzhi discourse. A comparative approach is adopted to examine the similarities, differences, and multi-layeredness of social and educational challenges faced by Han Chinese, the ethnic majority, and Tibetans. This study demonstrates that local navigations of state discourses and systems are attempts to learn modernity in local social-historical contexts. In particular, parents’ navigations of state schooling are ‘practices of the self’ which constitute their own governance. My findings show that parents both accommodate and negotiate state discourses in their daily encounters with state schooling. Parents from the two different ethnic groups show many similar ‘practices of the self’. Although their understandings of state schooling and practices to navigate it diverge from state discourses, my findings demonstrate that state discourses and systems nevertheless powerfully shape parental subjectivities, conducting them to be self-responsible and responsible for children’s educational success. However, due to their both similar (rurality) and different (ethnicity) social locations and relations with the state, state discourses and systems also have similar and different implications for Han Chinese and Tibetan families. Hierarchical parenthood has been constructed based on underlying logics of parental suzhi discourse. The findings also challenge recent scholarly arguments that reduce social challenges faced by Tibetans to rural-urban issues and provide a new lens through which to understand and respond to the multi-layered challenges faced by rural families from different ethnic groups in China.