Kyle E David
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Martyrs, Models, and Miscreants: The “Communist Child” in Wartime North China, 1937-1948 DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History by Kyle Ellison David Dissertation Committee Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Co-chair Associate Professor Emily Baum, Co-chair Professor Susan K. Morrissey Associate Professor Anita Casavantes Bradford 2021 © 2021 Kyle Ellison David DEDICATION to Martin and Jayden whose own childhoods have been inextricably linked to those discussed herein ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF IMAGES iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1 CHAPTER 2: The Birth of the Chinese Communist Child, 1922-1936 28 CHAPTER 3: Polemical Pedagogy: Educating Little Revolutionaries 67 CHAPTER 4: “Always Prepared”: The Anti-Japanese Children’s League 111 CHAPTER 5: Everyday Childhood in Japanese-Occupied North China 141 CHAPTER 6: Martyrs, Models, and Miscreants 182 CHAPTER 7: Conclusion 225 REFERENCES 237 iii LIST OF IMAGES Image 5.1 Wen Sanyu at “Heroes of the Masses” rally 200 Image 5.2 Textbook illustration of Wen Sanyu 202 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am forever indebted to my two advisors, Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Dr. Emily Baum, for their patience, kindness, and enthusiastic support throughout the last seven years. I am grateful for the opportunity they provided upon admitting me to the doctoral program, the intellectual rigor of the training they have provided, and the promptness with which they have attended to providing feedback on my work and seemingly endless requests for letters of recommendation and other bureaucratic demands. I am equally fortunate to have received mentorship from Dr. Susan Morrissey and Dr. Anita Casavantes Bradford, who have served as secondary advisors for this project. My training and intellectual development have benefited enormously from the diversity of thought and perspectives they and other professors within the Department of History have generously offered me throughout this journey. At some point or another, the following scholars have contributed to this work over coffee, through conference and panel discussions, emails, or facilitating introductions to materials and new colleagues: Paul Pickowicz, Joseph Esherick, Jeremy Brown, Karl Gerth, Timothy Cheek, and Fabio Lanza. On the Chinese mainland, I am thankful to Ma Weiqiang and Deng Hongqin, who were always charitable in providing language and resource support. I am grateful to Hebei University’s Gu Gengyou and Hong Shanwei, who provided the personal friendships and academic resources that supported my research during the summer of 2016, and to Professor Chen Yong at UCI for facilitating these introductions. I thank Yu Yang at Hebei Technical Normal University for providing logistical support during my ten months of research during the 2017-2018 academic year. I am indebted to Li Bingkui, Yang Qiming, and Ren Yaoxing, with whom I shared many meals and wonderful conversations over the last several years. For their professionalism, attention detail, willingness to read multiple iterations of the same chapters or articles under tight deadlines, and—most importantly—their enduring friendship, I thank Olivia Humphrey, Stephen Pascoe, Matthew Wills, Peter Braden, and Yidi Wu. This voyage would not have been possible without you. I am privileged to have received generous funding for the research and writing of this dissertation. Major sources of funding have come from an Andrew Mellon / American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a United States Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and a Henry Luce / ACLS Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant. I am equally thankful for funding provided by the Hoover Institution in the form of a Silas Palmer Research Fellowship, Stanford University’s East Asia Library, UC Irvine’s School of Humanities and Center of Asian Studies, and Charles and Ann Quilter. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the love, warmth, and support provided by my partner, Chanjuan, and our two children, Martin and Jayden. They have contributed to this project in so many ways, least of which have been by offering motivation, encouragement, and a place to escape. I dedicate this project to Martin and Jayden, whose own childhoods have been inextricably linked to the children discussed herein. v CURRICULUM VITAE Kyle Ellison David 2005 B.A. in English, University of Florida 2005-6 English Instructor, Caledonian English School, Prague, Czech Republic 2006-14 Dean of Studies, Will-Excel TESOL, Harbin, China Assistant Director of Studies, Sunshine English Language School, Harbin, China 2014 M.A. in History, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China 2015-16 Teaching Assistant, History Department, University of California, Irvine 2016 Henry Luce / American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Pre-dissertation Travel Grant 2017-18 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship 2018 M.A. in History, University of California, Irvine 2019-20 Mellon / ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship 2021 Ph.D. in History, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Chinese Communist Party, children, childhood, and youth, modern Chinese history PUBLICATIONS “The Poster Child of the ‘Second’ Cultural Revolution: Huang Shuai and Shifts in Age Consciousness, 1973-1979,” Modern China, Vol. 44 (2018), Issue 5: 497-524. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Martyrs, Models, and Miscreants: The “Communist Child” in Wartime North China, 1937-1948 By Kyle Ellison David Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Irvine, 2021 Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Co-chair Professor Emily Baum, Co-chair This dissertation argues that children have contributed significantly to the rise and longevity of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) power. Utilizing a broad and varied source base— including cadre work reports, newspapers, and wartime primary school textbooks—it asks and answers three broad questions. First, prior to China’s War of Resistance (1937-1945), how had individuals associated with the Chinese Communist movement historically conceptualized children and childhood? In short, what was their ideal-type “communist child,” and what type of childhood should this young individual experience? Second, during the war, what institutions did adults devise in order to realize their ideal-type “communist child” in the flesh? Third, what was the lived experience of children who grew up during this critical period? How did they respond to adult prerogatives? To what extent, if at all, did they become “communist children”? Relying on close readings of government directives, cadre work reports, newspapers, pedagogical journals, wartime primary school textbooks, and many other primary source materials, this project aims to contextualize and excavate rural children’s life experiences. In doing so, it argues that children made critical contributions to multiple war efforts, as spies, vii sentries, and saboteurs, and to building Communist Party hegemony as agents of revolutions. It concludes that a focus on children as historical actors highlights the centrality of their labor to the CCP’s military success, state-building efforts, and ascendance to political power. Finally, by juxtaposing the bourgeoning party-state’s ideal-type “communist child” with accounts of what actual children did and said, this project moves the historiography of Chinese children from one focused solely on the intellectual history of childhood to, instead, the first generation of children to be fully raised with the Chinese socialist system. viii CHAPTER 1: Introduction This project began with a conversation involving two of my mentors, Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a specialist in modern China, and Professor Anita Casavantes Bradford, an expert in Chicano/Latino Studies and History. In the fall of 2014, I was discussing with the two potential topics for my first-year research paper. At the time, I had been looking through a compendium of oral histories discussing China’s War of Resistance (1937-1945) against Japan. The entries had been collected from individuals involved in education and propaganda work throughout the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) northern territories. I remember sharing feelings that teetered between shock and amusement that children apparently served as sentries in a paramilitary capacity. In the entry I had just finished reading, I detailed for the two, a group of children had positioned themselves outside of a local Japanese army camp. While to uninformed passersby the children might have appeared to be playing, in reality their sole purpose was to watch for soldier deployment. When that happened, one of the children would run to notify a group of his or her peers—patiently waiting down the street—that the soldiers were on patrol. These children would then disperse to pre-determined areas in order to brief individuals carrying out activities unauthorized by the occupying Japanese government. Such activities included Communist cadre meetings, assessing and enforcing taxation policies, and attending anti-Japanese school lessons. Upon receiving notification that a patrol was out, those involved in these clandestine activities would immediately break up so as to avoid detection and hence harsh reprisals. As a historian of children and childhood, Dr. Casavantes Bradford was immediately drawn to my observations. “Look