CHILDREN's LITERATURE in CHINA, 1920S-1960S By
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FROM LU XUN’S “SAVE THE CHILDREN” TO MAO’S “THE WORLD IS YOURS”: CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN CHINA, 1920s-1960s by Evgenia Stroganova B.A., St. Petersburg State University, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Asian studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2014 © Evgenia Stroganova, 2014 Abstract In 1929 the leading Chinese intellectual Hu Shi said: “To understand the degree to which a particular culture is civilized, we must appraise … how it handles its children.”1 In 1957, Chairman Mao told Chinese youth that “both the world and China’s future belonged to them.”2 In both eras, cultural leaders placed children and youth in the centre of cultural and political discourse associating them with the nation’s future. This thesis compares Chinese children’s literature during the Republican period (1912-1949) and the early People’s Republic of 1949- 1966, until the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and argues that children’s writers who worked in both new Chinas treated youth and children as key agents in building a nation-state. In this thesis, I focus on the works of three prominent writers, Ye Shengtao (1894-1988), Bing Xin (1900-1999) and Zhang Tianyi (1906-1985) who wrote children’s literature and were prominent cultural figures in both eras. Their writing careers make for excellent case studies in how children’s literature changed from one political era to another. I conduct thematic and stylistic textual analysis of their works and read them against their historical and cultural backgrounds to determine how children’s writings changed and why. 1 Anne Behnke Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2004), 1. 2 Mary Ann Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (New York, London: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1999), 2. ii As anticipated, I showed that during both eras, children’s literature and politics were closely related. Another expected finding is that the manner of writing for children changed significantly as children from victims turned into active agents of the nation’s future. Challenging the view that children’s writers of the early People’s Republic merely followed the Party line, I argue that Ye, Bing, and Zhang remained loyal to the task of “saving children.” Another unexpected finding is that the Chinese Communist Party did not invent new cultural policies toward children from scratch, but employed numerous policies and ideas, including literary ideas, of the Nationalist regime that also inherited much from the late Qing. iii Preface This research was conducted by me under the supervision of Dr. Christopher G. Rea. The project aims to analyze and compare the view of the child and children’s literature in Republican China and the early People’s Republic of China. For this study I used works by modern Chinese writers, scholarship on China, and also official documents from both periods and microforms from 1920s China’s journals. All works are cited and included in the bibliography. iv Table of contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ........................................................................................................................................... iv Table of contents ............................................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 Why children’s literature? ............................................................................................... 1 1.2 Study importance and outline ......................................................................................... 6 1.3 Children of empire: what did the republic inherit? ......................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Children’s fiction of the republican period (1912-1949) .......................................16 2.1 The modern discovery of the child ............................................................................... 18 2.2 Pioneers in writing for children .................................................................................... 28 2.2.1 Ye Shengtao .............................................................................................................. 29 2.2.2 Bing Xin .................................................................................................................... 35 2.2.3 Zhang Tianyi ............................................................................................................. 41 v 2.3 Children of the republic: what did the PRC inherit? ..................................................... 48 Chapter 3: Children’s fiction of the early MAO era (1949-1966) ...........................................60 3.1 Starting from scratch: reimagining the child to rejuvenate china ................................. 62 3.2 Writing the child and writing for the child in the 1950s ............................................... 74 3.2.1 Ye Shengtao .............................................................................................................. 81 3.2.2 Bing Xin .................................................................................................................... 85 3.2.3 Zhang Tianyi ............................................................................................................. 95 Chapter 4: Conclusions .............................................................................................................103 References ...................................................................................................................................109 vi Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Dr. Timothy Cheek from UBC Institute of Asian Research for introducing to me Dr. Christopher G. Rea who became my supervisor and whom I am greatly indebted to for all his directions and assistance in my work and for his patience, understanding and encouragement. I appreciate Dr. Rea’s kindness in giving me much of his time, setting me flexible deadlines, providing me with valuable feedback and advices and taking time to carefully look through my each work and even to correct my English. I am very grateful for his huge help throughout all these years starting with the time when I was applying to the UBC. This greatly encouraged me on the path of my academic improvement. I am also very thankful to Dr. Rea for having made my education interesting, as his instruction and reading recommendations were great and as he allowed me to learn things outside my major that I wanted to learn. I am also grateful to my instructors at UBC, who kindly accepted me in their classes as a student from another department full of curiosity for their subject. I want to say special thanks to Jasmina Miodragovic, Graduate Secretary of Asian Studies, and Dr. Stephania Burk, who helped me get into these courses. I am very grateful as Jasmina has also been helping me since the time I was applying to UBC and was often the person I would go to see when I did not know what to do. I am thankful to the whole Asian Studies department for the wonderful friendly atmosphere. My thanks also go to my loving and inspiring family and friends, especially Harshanvit Singh, Alexandre Barnaud, Nikolay Stroganov, Dulguun Davaanyam, Amit Kumar, and Vasiliy Triandafilidi, for their help and support. vii And I would love to sincerely thank my Committee members Dr. Catherine Swatek and Dr. Dafna Zur for taking time to read my thesis and for providing me with valuable and very helpful feedback and to Dr. Nam-lin Hur for kindly agreeing to chair my defense. viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Why children’s literature? In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals discovered that the child was psychologically and mentally different from the adult. However, as Andrew F. Jones puts it, the child had for a long time before that been an “object of ideological investment,” 3 as courts of numerous dynasties had put efforts into the child’s ideological upbringing for millenia. Anne Behnke Kinney claims that children became objects of intellectual debates for the first time during the Han dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 220), when historians Sima Qian (145/135 – 86 B.C.) and Ban Gu (32-92 A.D.) referred to children and childhoods of famous people in their works.4 The Confucian view of human maturation held that childhood was the stage at which habitually good or bad behavior was established in the individual. It advocated moral education of children to raise wise and well-behaved princes and aristocrats who would preserve dynastic power.5 To raise loyal citizens, Han rulers also established China’s first nationwide system of state- sponsored educational institutions for boys.6 3 Andrew F. Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 23-24. 4 Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China, 3. 5Ibid., 9. 6Ibid., 14. 1 Song dynasty (960-1279) rulers built upon Han educational achievements, as