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CHILDREN’S
LITERATURE AND
TRANSNATIONAL
KNOWLEDGE IN
MODERN CHINA
EDUCATION, RELIGION,
AND CHILDHOOD
SHIH-WEN SUE CHEN
Children’s Literature and Transnational
Knowledge in Modern China
Shih-Wen Sue Chen
Children’s Literature
and Transnational
Knowledge in Modern
China
Education, Religion, and Childhood
Shih-Wen Sue Chen
Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
For my parents, Tung-jung Chen and Pi-fen Liu
Acknowledgments
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
6 Conclusion181
Glossary191
Bibliography203
Index239
ix
About the Author
xi
Note on Transliteration, Chinese
Characters, and Abbreviations
I use Hanyu pinyin for transliteration, except for citations from sources where
alternative systems of transliteration are used. Wherever possible, I provide the
pinyin equivalent when quoting these sources, except for Peking and Canton, for
which I have preserved the common English spelling. All translations are mine,
unless otherwise stated. For consistency, traditional Chinese characters are used in
the glossary and bibliography.
Abbreviations
ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
APMP American Presbyterian Mission Press
ARATS Annual Report of the American Tract Society
ARCLS Annual Report of the Christian Literature Society
ARCRTS Annual Report of the Chinese Religious Tract Society
ARSDK Annual Report of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and
General Knowledge Among the Chinese
ATS American Tract Society
CLS Christian Literature Society for China
LMS London Missionary Society
RTS Religious Tract Society
XHYB Xiaohai yuebao
xiii
List of Figures
xv
CHAPTER 1
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 chil-
dren’s 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 “a recurring site for expressing concerns about the reform of the national
culture in modern Chinese history” (1997, 198). Many researchers under-
score 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
children’s texts published in China in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries can illuminate the values that children represented, because
children’s literature is purposeful, “its intention being to foster in the child
reader [an understanding] of some socio-cultural values which, it is
assumed, are shared by author and audience” (Stephens 1992, 3). The
dominant ideologies that circulated during the period of a text’s produc-
tion are usually consciously or unconsciously reflected in the work.
However, a text may also try to challenge certain hegemonic attitudes
toward children, as the “Children’s Republic” article attempted.
This book argues that late Qing and early Republican Chinese chil-
dren’s 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
4 S.-W. S. CHEN
Confucian texts. Scripts “are mental schemata that are internalized by the
participants in any given cultural system” and “are maintained by contin-
ual externalization through narrative artifacts…. In literary terms, scripts
are substantiated by stereotypical plot structures, motifs, and metaphors
recycled from one story to another” (González and Wesseling 2013, 259).
Scripts can shape readers’ understanding of their role in society and their
relationships with others (Stephens, 14). Because Chinese children were
exposed to the familiar script of the filial child, they may have anticipated
a certain sequence of actions when reading new literature produced at this
time, and would probably have been surprised when events did not unfold
according to the dominant script. Emer O’Sullivan emphasizes the impor-
tance of acknowledging “the simultaneous presence of different ideas of
childhood” (2005, 62), and it should be noted that besides the dominant
Confucian image of the child, other ideas of childhood influenced by
Buddhist and Daoist views existed. However, the Confucian ideal was
most prevalent.7
While many of the late Qing and early Republican children’s texts did
not propose radical or revolutionary new ideas of childhood, some of
them challenged the familiar script by showing children, particularly girls,
behaving outside expected norms. Such narratives argued against the
familiar Confucian script and provided new ways of thinking about adult-
child relationships where children are not voiceless or powerless. These
different representations of childhood signaled a shift toward more diver-
sified, less one-dimensional images of children in the twentieth century.
Numerous scholars have discussed the figure of the Chinese child that
emerged during and after the May Fourth period (ca. 1916–24).8 Kate
Foster (2013) points out that the idea of the child as both pure and a savior
was emphasized in the May Fourth era, but the image of a “tainted” or
“evil” child emerged later. Xu Xu observes that the “modern Chinese
child” in this period was “an essentialized human being possessing a set of
innate characteristics, such as imagination, curiosity, purity, and inno-
cence, and was made biologically and psychologically different from
adults” (2013b, 35). Discourses around conceptions of the child and chil-
dren’s literature that circulated during the May Fourth period have been
dissected by Chang-tai Hung (1985), Catherine Pease (1995), Mary Ann
Farquhar (1999), Bi Lijun (2010), Andrew F. Jones (2011), Xie Xiaohong
(2011), Xu Xu (2013a, b), Fang Lijuan (2015), Zhu Ziqiang (2015), Lisa
Chu Shen (2018), and many others who point out the influence of
American educator John Dewey (1859–92) and German pedagogue
PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, CHINESE INTELLECTUALS, AND CHILDREN’S… 5
iscussion of Lin Shu’s work for children and Liang Qichao’s calls for new
d
writing for children.11 Ershi shiji Zhongguo ertongwen xueshi (A History of
20th Century Chinese Children’s Literature, 2006), edited by Zhang
Yongjian, only has one chapter on children’s literature before the May
Fourth period, with brief introductions to the different genres of literature
available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12
While monographs have been published on missionary literature in
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century China, most discuss writing
for adults. John T. P. Lai’s Negotiating Religious Gaps: The Enterprise of
Translating Christian Tracts by Protestant Missionaries in Nineteenth-
Century China (2012b) focuses specifically on tracts, and primarily on
adult tracts. Although one chapter is about tracts for children and insight-
fully examines The Peep of Day, Lai mainly analyzes issues of translation.
Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Essays by
Patrick Hanan (2004) includes a chapter on missionary novels of the
nineteenth century, but primarily explores missionary authors’ works for
adults. Children’s literature is mentioned only in passing, as is also the case
in Song Lihua’s Chuanjiaoshi hanwen xiaoshuo (A Study of Western
Missionaries’ Chinese-language Novels) (2010a), Zhao Xiaolan and Wu
Chao’s Chuanjiaoshi zhongwen baokanshi (A History of the Missionaries’
Chinese Press, 2011), and Roswell Britton’s The Chinese Periodical Press,
1800–1912 (1933).13
This book analyzes how the Chinese children’s texts published in the
fifty-year period between 1865 and 1915 offered alternative models of
childhood, which ushered in ensuing dramatic and intense debates about
children and childhood. It begins in the 1860s, with the publication of
Hengli shilu (1865), a missionary translation of Mary Martha Sherwood’s
bestselling The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814), and con-
cludes at the beginning of the May Fourth era when the term ertong de
wenxue (a children’s literature) was coined by Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967),
whose brother Lu Xun (1881–1936) has been hailed as “the founder of
modern Chinese children’s literature” (Ban 2014, 30; Naftali 2016, 27;
Jiang 1961).14 Zhou’s term appeared in 1920, but there is no consensus
on when “children’s literature” appeared in China. Some argue that it
emerged in 1908 with the publication of “A Kingdom without Cats” (Wu
mao guo) by Sun Yuxiu (1871–1922), “the founding father of Chinese
fairy tales” (Ho 1997, 130; Huang 2018, 59; Fang 2015, 32).15 Others
believe that Ye Shengtao’s “The Scarecrow” (Daocaoren), published in
1923, marked the “beginning” of modern Chinese children’s literature
PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, CHINESE INTELLECTUALS, AND CHILDREN’S… 7
(Bi and Fang 2013; Stroganova 2014; Wang 2015). Yet another view is
that literature for Chinese children existed before the twentieth century
(Hu 1982; Hung 1985; Song 2010a; Tse 2013; Wang Quangen 2018;
Zhang Xianghuan 1988). I agree with the latter view, because, as this
book will demonstrate, both Protestant missionaries and Chinese intel-
lectuals, highly concerned about China’s future toward the end of the
Qing dynasty, tried to use children’s literature to help the future genera-
tion gain the knowledge they needed to become useful members of a
new society.
who believed that children were “far easier to improve than the grown-up
Chinese” (“Summary of News” 1875, 468). Missionaries and Chinese
intellectuals produced children’s literature because of a mutually held
belief that children were malleable. Children needed adult guidance to
lead them on the right path. For missionaries, this meant children should
be led toward a deep knowledge of God, while the Chinese intellectuals
felt children needed to be equipped with knowledge to save China. Prolific
translator Lin Shu (1852–1924) stated in 1898, “Don’t let rotten stuff
enter children’s minds, enlighten children by using [new] knowledge”
(cited in Bai 2005b, 182). As noted translator and scholar Yan Fu wrote in
1902, “Of all the evils which confront China, ignorance is the most dire,
since it is only knowledge which can overcome all of China’s ills” (cited in
Davin 1987, 38).18 Thus, for Chinese reformers, the highest priority for
the next generation was the acquisition of skills that would enable them to
protect China against encroaching foreign powers.
A key event that heightened anxieties about China’s future was Japan’s
victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). This war was preceded
by severe losses in the two Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60) and the
Sino-French War (1884–85), despite attempts during the Self-
Strengthening Movement (ca. 1861–95) and the Hundred Days Reform
(1898) to modernize China. Qing officials set up official agencies in the
1860s to engage in systematic translation projects because translation was
regarded as key to “learning from the West” (xixue). By 1895, twenty-two
institutions had been set up for teaching “specific branches of western
knowledge” (Bastid 1987, 8). Attempts to modernize China had previ-
ously focused on improving the country’s technological and military capa-
bilities, but, by 1897, it was beginning to be understood that change
needed to be made in other areas such as politics, economics, culture, and
education (Qian 2015, 5). Reformers and intellectuals argued that if
China was to progress and resist military invasions and colonizing forces,
the education system needed to be changed. New textbooks were needed
as well (Bai 2008, 214). Some Chinese officials regarded foreign educa-
tion as “an instrument of intellectual and moral formation which enabled
individuals to construct a nation” (Bastid, 9). Although intellectuals
engaged in debates about different educational approaches, they agreed
on the transformative power of education. As Paul J. Bailey observes,
“moderates and radicals exhibited boundless confidence in the power of
education to bring about positive change and transform the people into a
patriotic and economically productive citizenry” (1990, 83). Influential
PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, CHINESE INTELLECTUALS, AND CHILDREN’S… 9
The young are our hope,—If we lose them we lose everything. Their minds
are eager for knowledge,—receptive, plastic, of vivid imagination, full of
wonder and responsive to truth and honor, and delighted with fresh facts
and new information. This is the nature of the young mind in every nation;
10 S.-W. S. CHEN
When men are young, their minds and emotions are not settled. With
whomever they closely associate, they are imbued, soaked, molded and dyed
with the way of thinking, laughing, and acting. Even though they have no
intention of imitating their associates, they are quietly moved and uncon-
sciously changed, and naturally they end by resembling each other. (Cited in
Knapp 2005, 71)
the age of ten, and they were mostly illiterate (Gibson 1877, 67). However,
because there are varying definitions of the word “literate,” literacy rates
that are cited also differ. There was a distinction between “full literacy,”
“functional skills in reading and writing,” and “rudimentary literacy
skills,” depending on one’s socioeconomic status (Bai 2005b, xiv; Johnson
1985; Rawski 1979). This may explain why literacy rates among men
ranged from as low as five percent in some estimates to as high as forty-five
percent in others (Reed 2004, 5).26 Some scholars believe that in the
1800s, thirty to forty percent of Chinese men were literate, which was
relatively high compared with Europe at the time, whereas only two to ten
percent of women could read and write (Woodside and Elman 1994,
530–31). However, missionary John Gibson speculated that the literacy
rate was even lower. In 1877, he stated that only one percent of women
could read, compared with ten percent of men. Gibson concludes that
there were less than twelve million readers in China. He admits that this is
only an estimate, but his argument is that there was “an exaggerated idea
of the number of those who can read in China” (1877, 66). Regardless of
the exact number, these figures reveal that the number of boys who could
read was significantly higher than the number of literate girls, because
most girls were denied formal schooling until the early twentieth century.
Education for children before the age of six or seven was usually con-
ducted at home.27 One Hundred Surnames, Thousand-Character Text, and
Three-Character Classic provided children, mostly boys, with knowledge
of roughly 2000 Chinese characters, “which was the vocabulary acquired
by boys from elite families before enrolling in formal studies with a tutor”
(Rawski 1979, 47). Children also read The Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial
Piety (Ershisi xiao, thirteenth to fourteenth century), a book children still
read today.28 The stories therein were retold in various primers, such as the
Ming dynasty book Mengyang tushuo (Illustrations and Explanations for
Children). Presented as “true stories,” these texts aimed to instill Confucian
values in the implied readers through anecdotes of children demonstrating
filial piety (Mo and Shen 1999). These primers socialized children into a
world where loyalty to the ruler, social conformity, and duty to the family,
particularly to parents, were of utmost importance (Hsiung 2005,
163–64). The filial child was the ideal child (Bai 2005b).29
In addition to the popular titles mentioned above, illustrated character
books, which used pictures to teach character recognition, were read by
younger children. The books function virtually like an illustrated glossary
(Rawski 1979, 128–37). Because these books were easier for children to
PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES, CHINESE INTELLECTUALS, AND CHILDREN’S… 13
understand, they were used to instruct younger children. The first illus-
trated Chinese primer, Xinbian duixiang siyan (Newly Revised Reader
with Four Characters to the Line and Pictures to Match), appeared in
1436,30 over two hundred years before the first Western children’s picture
book Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures) (1658) was pub-
lished (Hummel 1946, 21–22). Children from lower-middle-class families
may only have read illustrated character books that helped them master
basic vocabulary that was essential in their daily lives as they eschewed the
imperial examinations for careers in commerce, craftsmanship, or agricul-
ture (Minjie Chen 2015, 30).
Illustrated character books vary from the Confucian classics in that the
former is concerned with lexicon that non-elite readers used in their every-
day activities, whereas the latter is concerned with Confucian ideas and
more philosophical issues (Rawski 1979, 137). Boys from literati or elite
families were usually aged six or seven when they began to study the Four
Books (Analects, Great Learning, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean) and
Five Classics (Book of Rites, Book of Changes, Book of History, Book of Songs,
and Spring and Autumn Annals) under a tutor to help them prepare for
the civil service examinations, which were taken by young men across the
country who aspired to become high-ranking officials (Woodside and
Elman, 548).31 These esoteric texts, written in classical Chinese, were dif-
ficult for children to understand, and students were made to memorize the
lines without comprehending their meaning. Formal schooling began at
the age of ten, and “by thirteen the student will have studied music,
poetry, dance, ritual, archery, and horsemanship” (Tu 1976, 109).32 At
the age of fourteen or fifteen, girls pinned up their hair in the hairpin (ji)
ceremony, marking their passage to adulthood (Hsiung 2005, 184). For
boys, the rite-of-passage ritual—the capping ceremony (guan li)—was
held as they turned twenty (Hsiung 2005, 184; Tu, 109).33 As these time-
lines suggest, adults needed to invest a lengthy period of time on instruct-
ing children to become “complete people” (cheng ren, literally, “becoming
a person”). As adults, they were expected to worship their ancestors and
continue the family line (Naftali, 22).
However, alternative models of childhood, mainly from the United
States, Britain, Japan, France, and Germany, were introduced through late
Qing children’s print culture. These models, some more subversive than
others, projected different images of childhood for children to consider.
As Nicolai Volland argues, “print culture played an essential role in the
ongoing processes of defining the formal and aesthetic dimensions of
14 S.-W. S. CHEN
literature in China” (2015, 360). Print culture also played a part in shap-
ing and defining children’s literature as a genre. Missionaries began pub-
lishing literature for children a few decades earlier than the Chinese
intellectuals, whose efforts to produce new reading materials for children
were more concentrated after the 1890s, as heightened anxieties about
China’s future permeated society.
that such literature would benefit the Chinese people because they could
re-read printed material many times, whereas they may forget the weekly
sermons they heard. Not only would these publications be good for stu-
dents in schools, patients in hospitals would benefit from them too.
Moreover, according to American missionary S. L. Baldwin (1835–1902),
“comparatively illiterate people … will learn something from good pic-
tures and stories, when they will learn in no other way” (1877, 211).
Baldwin also hoped that they would “help to foster a taste for reading
good books” (211). Presbyterian missionary Hunter Corbett (1835–1920)
mentioned the need for publishing books for children in particular:
I believe, without reserve, that one of the most important duties of the
Religious Tract Society is to secure and publish suitable literature of a pious
character for this class [children]—books well written and well illustrated.
Mrs. Browning has said: ‘No child can be called fatherless who has God and
his mother. No youth can be called friendless who has God and the compan-
ionship of good books.’ (1903, 30, original emphasis)
which had sold 350,000 copies within the first ten years of publication,
was translated by Mary Crossette in 1913 (Rickard 2006, 110).
Teja.