The Image of China in Red Scarf Girl: Promoting International Understanding or Reinforcing Western Hegemony?

The promotion of intercultural understanding is an important aim of international children’s literature. Often recommended by scholars and teachers as a positive international children’s book about Chinese culture, Ji-li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution focuses on the author’s childhood experiences during the first two years of China’s Cultural Revolution. This article argues that the book’s prologue and epilogue frame the central narrative of the author’s experiences as a young girl during the Cultural Revolution in a way that reinforces an orientalist discourse wherein China features as a despotic and backward country in opposition to a free and democratic America. Thus, the article presents the framing sections as setting up this dichotomy fundamental to the West’s hegemony over “other” countries. However, the function of the child narrator is also highlighted. That is, the historically grounded perspective of the child narrator is cast as resisting the frames’ problematic construction of the central narrative simply as an instance of China’s violence and cruelty.