{"id":1491,"date":"2021-11-03T12:13:07","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T12:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/?p=1491"},"modified":"2021-11-03T12:13:07","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T12:13:07","slug":"chinese-childhoods-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/chinese-childhoods-then-and-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Childhoods, Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Share<\/a><\/p>\n

Written by Carl Kubler<\/span><\/p>\n

Childhood in China is undergoing a revolution. On May 31, 2021, just a few years after ending the decades-old one-child policy (yihai zhengce<\/em> \u4e00\u5b69\u653f\u7b56) that had defined much of urban family planning from the 1980s until 2016, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party announced that in an effort to combat falling birth-rates, a new three-child policy<\/a> (sanhai zhengce<\/em> \u4e09\u5b69\u653f\u7b56) would replace the existing limit of two children allowed per family. Also this year, new restrictions on online gaming<\/a> for netizens under the age of 18 have erased millions in stock value from publicly traded gaming companies such as NetEase (Wangyi<\/em> \u7f51\u6613) and Tencent (Tengxun<\/em> \u817e\u8baf), as officials seek to curb gaming addictions among minors. A roughly contemporaneous crackdown on for-profit after-schooling tutoring<\/a> for elementary and middle school students has made even larger waves as government authorities seek to reduce financial and mental health burdens on parents and children, cratering the share prices of private education firms such as New Oriental (Xin dong fang<\/em> \u65b0\u4e1c\u65b9) and TAL Education (Hao wei lai<\/em> \u597d\u672a\u6765) and leading many to wonder what changes are next in store for China\u2019s youth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the specifics of these policies are new, efforts to reimagine and remake Chinese childhood are not. Since at least the early twentieth century, Chinese thinkers and policymakers have framed the wellbeing of China\u2019s children as a key litmus test for the health of the nation. \u2018To understand the degree to which a particular culture is civilized,\u2019 wrote leading intellectual Hu Shi \u80e1\u9002 in 1929, \u2018we must appraise\u2026how it handles its children.\u2019 Essayist Lu Xun \u9c81\u8fc5 similarly implored Chinese audiences to \u2018save the children\u2019 in his 1919 Diary of a Madman<\/em> (Kuangren riji<\/em> \u72c2\u4eba\u65e5\u8bb0), calling for a modern nation led by a community of future adults not yet schooled in feudal society\u2019s cannibalistic ways. Recent historical scholarship has shown that such exhortations were more than just rhetoric, with a variety of educational programmes and social reforms aimed at improving children\u2019s welfare taking shape over the first half of the twentieth century (Tillman 2018<\/a>; Zarrow 2015<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

As I have argued elsewhere (Kubler 2018<\/a>), these exhortations took a dramatic new turn in the wake of the Second Sino-Japanese War, as Communist educators placed a new labour-oriented ideal of childhood at the centre of the nation\u2019s modernizing project. Prior to the 1940s, Chinese intellectuals and educators had largely treated childhood as a protected sphere, which was putatively insulated from the harsher realities of adult life, but the devastation of war had both ruptured that insulation and made the reconstruction of the nation\u2014with the full participation of all its citizens, regardless of their age or social station\u2014a matter of existential importance. Just as productive labour had become what one historian calls a ‘condition of social citizenship\u2019 in the first half of the twentieth century (Chen 2012<\/a>), in the post-war years this criterion of inclusion trickled down to encompass children as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Visual media were particularly powerful in facilitating this inclusion and shaping children\u2019s nascent worldviews. Lower-elementary literacy textbooks combined rhyming moral lessons about patriotism and national duty with striking images of children in adult roles\u2014as farmers, soldiers, factory workers\u2014and invited young readers to imagine themselves in service of the nation. ‘I love guns, I love guns,’ began one lesson. ‘There are pistols, rifles, and even machine guns; they protect my home.’ Many surviving textbooks from the era show that children actively coloured in the parts of the images that most resonated with them, while leaving other parts, like the bodies of enemy soldiers, devoid of colour.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Fig 1. Textbook illustration of children as soldiers, colored in by a child from Northeast China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Source: Andong sheng jiaoyuting \u5b89\u6771\u7701\u6559\u80b2\u5ef3 [Andong Province Bureau of Education], Changshi: Chuji xiaoxue<\/em> \u5e38\u8b58. \u521d\u7d1a\u5c0f\u5b78 [General knowledge: Lower-elementary school] (1946, 1:35).<\/p>\n

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Fig 2. Rhyming lesson about children\u2019s love of guns. Ibid., 1:36.<\/p>\n

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Fig 3. Textbook cover showing children in modern, adult roles. Gaoji xiaoxue Guoyu keben<\/em> \u9ad8\u7d1a\u5c0f\u5b78\u570b\u8a9e\u8ab2\u672c [Upper-elementary Mandarin textbook], vol. 2. 1951.<\/p>\n

Historians of childhood have long debated the extent to which the concept of childhood, as a separate and protected sphere of social development, is a modern societal invention, as French medievalist Philippe Ari\u00e8s controversially contended in the 1960s. Regardless of on which side of that debate one stands, however, recent developments have made clear that notions of childhood in China have continued to be reimagined and redefined into the present day. Although the construction of a modern Chinese nation may have lost much of the existential urgency that motivated societal changes in the mid-twentieth century, as Chinese policymakers envision new contours for state and society in the twenty-first century, the wellbeing and productivity of Chinese children remain inseparable from the wellbeing and productivity of the Chinese nation\u2014and arguably even more so than before.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carl Kubler is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Chinese history at the University of Chicago. His research interests include the history of childhood in twentieth-century China and the transnational dimensions of Qing socioeconomic history, with particular emphasis on the years immediately before and after the first Opium War. <\/em>Featured Image:\u00a0Who will get there first?<\/a> 1980. Source: University of Westminster’s China Visual Arts Project.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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