Abstract
For over 2000 years, while Chinese texts acknowledged children simply based on age, there was little written to cater for them as a distinct group of people with specific needs. In the early twentieth century, however, Chinese intellectuals ‘discovered’ childhood and created a modern literature for children. This literature experienced a series of dynamic changing representations of childhood, responding to the political needs of the times. This chapter focuses on this evolution, examining four distinctive periods: the dynastic period till 1911; the Republican period from 1911 to 1949; Mao’s socialist phase from 1949 to 1976; and the post-Mao ‘new era’ from 1976 to 2000. These changes have to be understood in China’s historical and socio-cultural contexts.
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Bi, L., Fang, X. (2013). Childhoods: Childhoods in Chinese Children’s Texts–Continuous Reconfiguration for Political Needs. In: Wu, Y., Mallan, K., McGillis, R. (eds) (Re)imagining the World. New Frontiers of Educational Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36760-1_5
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