Ethnic minorities occupy a marginal space in official Chinese policies. As economic development accelerates regional exchanges and open up cultural zones of contact, minority children's lives are intertwined with new forms of inclusion and exclusion. This project aims to examine a group of Hmong students' lives as embedded in three transformations in their pedagogical, communal, and household spaces-compulsory schooling, ethnic tourism, and parental migration. Through offering a detailed account of Hmong students' understandings and everyday experiences of being ethnic and becoming modernized, the goal of this project is to investigate the dynamics of the cultural production of educated citizenship in China's ethnic hinterland. I will explore how children experience, understand, and negotiate changes in these social domains from an actor-centered, ethnographic lens. By jointly investigating formal schooling and non-formal educative domains as interconnected pedagogical forces, not isolated social phenomena, this project hopes to enhance our understanding of social conditions of ethnic education, contribute to theoretical discussions on citizenship formation, enrich the worldwide literature on Hmong studies, and illuminate issues germane to contemporary China.