Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (review)

Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture is a historical inquiry into the vernacularization of developmental discourse in literary and media culture in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jones traces the origins of developmental thinking back to the translation of evolutionary biology into Chinese in the late nineteenth century, and illustrates how such thinking proliferated in early twentieth-century China. He argues that new evolutionary narrative forms emerged in this process, providing structure to historical imaginations and serving as a way of “knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical change” (p. 3). It was a way of “telling stories about the growth and progress of nations and national subjects in their relation to other nations and the natural world” (p. 7). In particular, the book examines the connections between “development” and the figure of the child found in the evolutionary narratives that appeared in an array of popular media, from print culture to cartoons and the cinema. The works of Lu Xun and his contemporaries, including his brother, the essayist Zhou Zuoren, constitute the primary archival material for this study.

Jones points out that in the context of a nineteenth-century imperialist world order, developmental thinking undergirded aspirations for national self-determination, wealth, and power. Development was adopted as a trope for reclaiming autonomy and gaining historical agency while managing the daunting reality and consequences of modernity. He argues insightfully that such thinking, however, carried with it inherent contradictions when adopted in the non-Western world—contradictions that did not go unquestioned or unchallenged by intellectuals such as Lu Xun. These contradictions, as Jones explains, are revealed in the “gap between its sense as an intransitive and inevitable historical unfolding, and as a descriptor for the transitive and purposive activity of active historical agents, particularly elite intellectuals and the state” (p. 3), in other words, “between agency and abjection, will and contingency, developers and those in need of development” (p. 5).

Jones convincingly illustrates that these contradictions formed a constitutive tension in modern Chinese literature and media culture. By borrowing narrative forms from Victorian fiction, Wu Jianren was able to make the future imaginable, but his New Story of the Stone eventually fell apart in terms of both form and ideology. In Lu Xun’s fiction, including “The Misanthrope” as well as many of his essays, this contradiction between the “unstoppable” and “naturally occurring” evolutionary changes and the desire for historical agency became a primary theme.

A central part of Jones’ book is a fascinating cultural history of the child, in which he tracks the intertwined figures of the child and the beast that circulated widely in mass media in the early twentieth century. In China during this period, the child was a sign of hope for a national future of power and prosperity. The efforts to define and mold the modern child were expressed in the newly introduced disciplines such as child studies and new forms of pedagogical print culture. Children were widely represented in literary writing and the popular media, and they became the targeted customers of commodities as well as bearers of nationalist messages in political movements such as the New Life Movement and the National Product Movement. Yet children’s literature, particularly the fairy tale, illuminates the same contradictions between transitive and intransitive development: If the adults had been contaminated by a cannibalistic cultural tradition already, who could “save the children”? And “how can children be ‘liberated’ from the yoke of tradition and the tyranny of adults and simultaneously harnessed to the task of driving forward national history?” (p. 110). Jones observes that Lu Xun was fully aware of “the inevitable failure of such utopian schemes and the impossibility of a decisive historical break with a tainted culture” (p. 111). Children, after all, are not blank sheets of paper and cannot serve as the ultimate redeemers of a condemned national culture and history.

This book should be...