Part of
Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving storiesEdited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 170–192
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 170–192
Chapter 8The affective construction of Chinese child citizenship in Little Friend, 1945–1949
After the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese society underwent a transition in imagining the nation and its citizenry. The visual and textual narratives in the long-running children’s periodical Little Friend highlight these changes as its post-war content features affective mechanisms to enlist children in a labor-oriented proletarian citizenship that emphasizes collectivism. Drawing on affect’s stickiness and retrospective way of working (Ahmed), the chapter details Little Friend’s affective crafting of a Chinese child citizenship through the periodical’s representations of laboring and disciplined child bodies, as well as its geographical discourses. This crafting, the chapter argues, served as a means to encourage children’s empathetic identification with the anticipated citizenship and the imagined nation during the late Republican period.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The history of Little Friend
- A visually formulated promise in the physical labor
- Geographical empathy
- Conclusion
-
Notes -
References
References (38)
Primary source
Xiao pengyou [Little Friend]. 1945–1949. Shanghai: Zhonghua Book Company.
Secondary sources
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
. 2010. Happy Objects. In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), 29–51. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 
Bi, Lijun & Xiangshu Fang. 2013. Childhoods: Childhoods in Chinese Children’s Texts-Continuous Reconfiguration for Political Needs. In (Re)Imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, & Roderick McGillis (eds), 55–68. Heidelberg: Springer.
Cai, Danni. 2020. Power, Politeness, and Print: Children’s Letter Writing in Republican China. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 13.1: 38–62.
Cai, Jie. 2019. Guonan xia de ertong xiuxue lvxing yu ertong zhutixing shenfen de jiangou [Children’s School Trips and the Construction of Children’s Subjectivity in the Context of National Calamity]. Gansu shehui kexue [Gansu Social Sciences] 6: 204–210.
Chen, Ying. 2013. Minguo shiqi ertong shijie he xiao pengyou de bankan tese yanjiu [Research on the Journal Features of Children’s World and Little Friend in Republican Period]. Master thesis, Hunan Normal University.
Culp, Robert. 2007. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
. 2019. The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Day, Jenny Huangfu. 2021. The War of Textbooks: Educating Children during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945. Twentieth-Century China 46.2: 105–129.
Farquhar, Mary Ann. 1999. Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe.
Hemmings, Clare. 2005. Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn. Cultural Studies 19.5: 548–567.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2016. Affect Studies and Literary Criticism. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Paul Rabinowitz (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jian, Ping. 2010. Shanghai shaonian ertong baokan jianshi [A Brief History of Shanghai Children’s Newspapers and Periodicals]. Shanghai: shaonian ertong chubanshe [Children’s Publishing House].
Kubler, Carl. 2018. Imagining China’s Children: Lower-Elementary Reading Primers and the Reconstruction of Chinese Childhood, 1945–1951. Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 7.1: 153–196.
Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Li, Lifang. 2013. Subjectivity and Culture Consciousness in Chinese Children's Literature. In Subjectivity in Asian Children's Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications, John Stephens (ed), 79–94. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Li, Jing & Zeyu Chang. 2021. Zai xiangxiang yu shijian zhijian de meijie: kangzhan qianxi minguo ertong kanwu de shenfen goujian kaocha [The Media between Imagination and Practice: An Investigation of Children’s Identity Construction in Pre-war Republican Children’s Magazines]. Xinwen xue yu chuanbo xue [Modern Communication (Journal of Communication University of China)] 2: 44–62.
Lynch, Michael. 2010. The Chinese Civil War, 1945–1949. Oxford: Osprey Pub.
Moore, Aaron William. 2016. Growing Up in Nationalist China: Self-Representation in the Personal Documents of Children and Youth, 1927–1949. Modern China 42.1: 73–110.
Owen, Stephen, ed. 1992. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, Mass. Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University.
Peng, Siyuan. 2013. Xiao pengyou jiushi nian (1922–2012) [Little Friend for Ninety Years (1922–2012)]. Shanghai: shaonian ertong chubanshe [Children’s Publishing House].
Plum, M. Colette. 2006. Unlikely Heirs: War Orphans during the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945. PhD dissertation, Sanford University.
. 2012. Lost Childhoods in a New China: Child-Citizen-Workers at War, 1937–1945. European Journal of East Asian Studies 11.2: 237–258.
. 2015. Inscribing War Orphans’ Losses into the Language of the Nation in Wartime China, 1937–1945. In Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, Stephanie Olsen (ed), 198–220. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheng, Ye. 1993. Xiao pengyou chuangkan qishi zhounian huigu [Little Friend: Review of 70 Years since Its Inception]. Zhejiang shifan daxue bao, shehui kexue ban [Journal of Zhejiang Normal University (Social Science Edition)] 2: 67–72.
Wang, David Der-wei. 2015. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press.
Xu, Lanjun. 2007. Save the Children: Problem Childhoods and Narrative Politics in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature. PhD dissertation, Princeton University.
. 2015. Ertong yu zhanzheng: guozu, jiaoyu ji dazhong wenhua [Children and War: Nation, Education and Mass Culture]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe [Peking University Press].
. 2016. Little Teachers: Children’s Drama, Traveling, and Ruptured Childhoods in 1930s and 1940s China. Twentieth-Century China 41.2: 180–200.
Xu, Lanjun & Lidan Li, eds. 2016. Jiangou Nanyang ertong: zhanhou xinma huayu ertong kanwu ji wenhua yanjiu [Constructing Southeast Asian Children: Studies on Post-War Chinese Periodicals for Children and Culture]. Singapore: Bafang wenhua chuangzuoshi [Global Publishing].
Xu, Xu. 2013a. Imagination: Imaginations of the Nation-Childhood and Children’s Literature in Modern China. In (Re)Imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, & Roderick McGillis (eds), 69–80. Heidelberg: Springer.
. 2013b. The Nation’s Child: Childhood, Children’s Literature and National Identity in Modern China. PhD dissertation., The Pennsylvania State University.
. 2013c. Translation, Hybridization, and Modernization: John Dewey and Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth Century China. Children’s Literature in Education 44.3: 222–237.
Xu, Yan. 2014. The Originality of Lu Xun’s Views of Children and China’s Modern Image of Children. In Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature, Claudia Nelson & Rebecca Morris (eds), 47–62. Translated by Chi Xin. Burlington: Ashgate.
Zarrow, Peter. 2015. Educating China: Knowledge, Society, and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zhang, Mei. 2016. Wanqing wusi shiqi ertong duwu shang de tuxiang xushi [Graphic Storytelling in Children's Books from the Late Qing to the May Fourth Period]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe [China Social Sciences Press].
Zhou, Ziqiang. 2014. The Discovery of Children: The Origins of Zhou Zuoren’s Thoughts on ‘Humane Literature’. In Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature, Claudia Nelson & Rebecca Morris (eds), 63–74. Translated by Xu Derong. Burlington: Ashgate.