In 1913, an article entitled âChildrenâs Republicâ (ertong gongheguo) in the missionary periodical The Childâs Paper (Xiaohai yuebao) informed readers about a curious piece of American history (vol. 39.6, 8â10).1 According to the author, âShaonianâ (Youth), in 1860, a man named William gathered a group of poor, uneducated children he saw wandering the streets of New York to work in his fields outside the city. His motivation was to help these young people realize that earning a wage is hard work. Those who performed well, earned more, while those who did not, received less. Observing the inevitable disagreements that erupted among the children, William set up a âchildrenâs courtâ presided over by a judge who was chosen by the members of the group. The judgeâs role was to adjudicate and resolve conflicts within the community. If a child was pronounced guilty, there was no corporal punishment. Rather, he must sleep on the ground instead of on his bed. The shame of being seen on the floor was enough to dissuade others from behaving badly. As the population of this village grew, William devised other systems until it became a âChildrenâs Republic.â There was a currency system and a âgovernmentâ consisting of an elected president, members of the Senate, and the House of Representatives who worked together to oversee the legislative, administrative, and judicial systems. A library, a museum, and a park provided places of respite after work. There was also a school that mostly taught morals, although the article does not state the number of hours the children spent there. William was strict about visitations from parents, and he also personally headed a training program to prepare the children in case they had to be drafted into the armed forces when they grew up and left the community. As news of this establishment spread, the number of children admitted continued to increase until it became a ârepublicâ of around 20,000 people.
The article promotes values such as the importance of a good work ethic and the need for order and structure in a childâs life. Yet, it simultaneously offers the idea that children can be agentic, a concept that was not widely circulated in early twentieth-century China. The article confidently suggests that children can be independent, make good decisions about governance, and submit to each otherâs authority with minimal adult supervision. Shaonian also presents the notion that children are the hope of the nation, because, at the end of the article, readers are informed that President (Woodrow) Wilson used to be part of the âChildrenâs Republic.â Although the âChildrenâs Republicâ is unlikely to have actually existed, this detail implies that a child does not have to be born into an elite family in order to become the president of the United States. Considering that China had then recently become a Republic in 1912, this articleâs publication was timely. Children, as the symbol of hope of Chinaâs future, became particularly pronounced in the late Qing (1644â1911) and early Republican (1912â49) period.2 This is evident in much of the literature produced for children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the Childrenâs World (Tongzi shijie) periodical proclaimed in its inaugural issue of April 6, 1903, that âwhether China will rise or fall in the twentieth century depends on the youth!â3
The image of the agentic child in the âChildrenâs Republicâ deviated from dominant attitudes toward children in traditional Chinese culture, where parents regarded children as their property (Bi and Fang 2013, 55) and not âindependent beings with their own thoughts and characteristicsâ (Li 2004, 190). Children in Imperial China were expected to feel grateful to their parents for bringing them into the world, and expectations placed on them related to how they expressed their filial piety ( xiao ), a key virtue in the Chinese society. Glorifying oneâs parents was the ultimate goal of filial piety, according to Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao Jing), a canonical Confucian text. The image of childhood in the âChildrenâs Republicâ may also surprise readers whose impressions of missionary periodicals are that they are highly conservative and pious. Not only does the âChildrenâs Republicâ lack a church, but God is never mentioned in the article. As this example and others in this book will demonstrate, the image of the child and attitudes toward childhood in reading materials for Chinese children published during the late Qing and early Republican era was varied and even contradictory.4 Translators and authors were influenced by Japanese, American, British, French, and German constructions of childhood.5 Some of the literature the Protestant missionaries and the Chinese authors produced for Chinese readers was translated, transformed, and circulated overseas in multiple directions, signaling the transnational nature of childrenâs print culture.
It is important to examine how children and childhood are constructed in these texts, because, according to Ann Anagnost, the figure of the child is âa recurring site for expressing concerns about the reform of the national culture in modern Chinese historyâ (1997, 198). Many researchers underscore the importance of considering the historical, cultural, and economic contexts in which childhood is constructed and defined (Anagnost, 198; Davin 1999, 14; Pozzi 2015, 336). Examining the figure of the child in childrenâs texts published in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can illuminate the values that children represented, because childrenâs literature is purposeful, âits intention being to foster in the child reader [an understanding] of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, are shared by author and audienceâ (Stephens 1992, 3). The dominant ideologies that circulated during the period of a textâs production are usually consciously or unconsciously reflected in the work. However, a text may also try to challenge certain hegemonic attitudes toward children, as the âChildrenâs Republicâ article attempted.
This book argues that late Qing and early Republican Chinese childrenâs literature presented multifaceted models of childhood through periodicals, tracts, novels, primers , readers, and textbooks published by Protestant missionaries and Chinese intellectuals. Different images of childhood in the texts offered the child reader windows into other cultural childhoods and suggested alternative ways of being. These models of childhood, including, but not limited to, the agentic child, the evangelical child, the playful child, the participatory child, and the questioning child, disrupted the dominant Confucian model of childhood and challenged the common cultural script of what it meant to be a child in this period of dramatic transition from the dynastic Qing empire to the Republic of China.6 Stories of exemplary self-sacrificing children who demonstrate their filial piety by behaving in extreme ways to show their devotion to their parents and, by extension, ancestors, were the dominant scripts in Confucian texts. Scripts âare mental schemata that are internalized by the participants in ...