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  • Journey to the East:Impressions of Children's Literature and Instructional Media in Contemporary China
  • Nellvena Duncan Eutsler (bio)

But if a man could pass the mysterious bounds that limit us and disappear from our ken into a fourth dimensional land, to come back soon and tell us of people living, as it were, side by side with us though unseen by us, to which strange people everything known to us, and more, was known, such a man would cause less wonderment than Marco Polo caused when he returned from China and the land of mystery and told of the things he witnessed.

Charles J. Finger, Introduction, The Travels of Marco Polo

The experience of visiting China causes "wonderment" even to the twentieth-century American. A Chinese-American woman returning to China in 1979 after an absence of thirty years remarked that a trip to China takes an American the greatest distance he can go, both geographically and culturally.1 A traveler today can span the geographical distance easily; spanning the cultural distance requires greater effort, as I discovered on my first trip to China in July 1979.

I took with me into China no preconceived notion of what I would find. Each visitor necessarily takes a special point of view into a new situation, however, and I entered China convinced that an accurate interpretation of any national culture depends upon the consideration of the books children read and the process of their education. I hoped to evaluate both Chinese methods of teaching and attitudes toward various media as instructional aids.

In particular, on my first trip I hoped to visit libraries in Shanghai, Nanking, and Peking; to explore such material as was available in a Chinese bookstore; to visit one commune nursery school, and to observe at least one school. Most of my hopes were realized, but schools were not in session; public school teachers were not available; and arrangements had not been made for us to visit children's libraries. My evaluation of children's education, therefore, was delayed [End Page 73] until I had an opportunity in January 1980 to visit a Chinese primary school, the Wushi Library, many museums, a Shanghai Children's Palace, and to spend one afternoon and evening in a Chinese home.

One overwhelming impression I received from these two experiences was that China still lives in the Middle Ages, in a nontechnological culture. Workers in the fields plant and harvest their crops by hand, using only hand tools, with the aid here and there of water buffalo. Large fields are watered by hand, one plant at a time. Wheelbarrows are trundled by hand and heavy burdens are balanced on shoulder poles. There are very few private automobiles and few trucks. The Chinese walk or (and here a modern note creeps in) ride the ever-present bicycle.

Our Peking guide-translator proudly told us that there is no longer any starvation in China. The busy workers in large fields and the numerous outdoor markets offering all sorts of produce to the consumer seemed to support the guide's assertion. However, a different kind of hunger is now prevalent among the Chinese: a hunger for good literature. Chinese citizens writing to their relatives in America today say that their physical needs are met. They say, "Don't send us clothes—send us books." The need for imaginative literature is not filled because of the didactic ideological emphasis in children's literature and also because of the commitment to scientific and technological development.

This present obsession with science and technology is, in essence, a drive to stabilize the system of Chinese Communism and to increase economic ties with the rest of the world—a drive which is profoundly modifying the language, the culture, and the education of China. Yet what the casual visitor fails to realize is that the move to modernization and the effort to learn from other countries are themselves traditions of great age in China, rather than expressions of self-doubt or inferiority. In the fifth-century A.D. and again in the seventh century, exploration to the West resulted in the importation and approval of Buddhism and, later, of Christianity and...

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