Conclusion

Abstract

If we agree, and there is room for doubt, that the much-discussed May-Fourth-era “discovery of the child” was fully realized in fiction, then the plethora and diversity of child images and narratives of childhood in late-twentieth-century China must at least comprise a rediscovery of the child. The population of children in these narratives ranges from the briefest of symbolic images to articulate beings whose subjectivity is intended to direct the text. Setting aside the social and cultural context, the use of the child image would in many ways be familiar to the literary and cultural commentators of an earlier era, and also to critics outside China. There are established tropes and well-worn, universal themes. From the clear-eyed children who provide a frank assessment of the world around them to the voiceless victims of adult negligence and violence, the child functions as critic of the present and as a portent of the future; as innocent foil and lost hope. Most constant, and most universal, in the imagined child and in the fictionalization of childhood is the endless interplay between innocence, supposed and real, and corruption, both external and internal. Most pervasive is the association made between the child and harm.

Each generation is worse than the last.¹