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  • Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China
  • Robin D. S. Yates
Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China. By Anne Behnke Kinney (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004) 294 pp. $55.00

This first book in English on childhood in early China is a most welcome and path-breaking achievement. Covering the period from roughly the Eastern Zhou dynasty's Spring and Autumn age (c. 770–480 B.C.E.) to the end of the Han (220 C.E.), it provides a comprehensive analysis of the attitudes toward children represented in historical, philosophical, and literary texts composed by male writers, as well as exciting new documents recently discovered by archaeologists. The author does not engage with recent theoretical or comparative studies in child psychology and development. She grounds her study solidly in the texts, though she appropriately recognizes that many of them are prescriptive, rather than descriptive, and do not supply objective reports on "actual conditions" (1).

Kinney's most important finding is presented in Chapter 1, "The Discovery of Childhood in Early China," in which she demonstrates that only in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) did children become the subject of a debate among a wide range of intellectuals. Among them, Confucians argued that children, endowed with incomplete moral faculties at birth, needed long and thorough education in order for a humane society to be established, whereas Daoists argued that children were pure and untainted by the corruption of the world. Education had to be initiated while the fetus was still in the mother's womb. The content of education for older youths consisted of the Confucian classics, starting with the Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects, now considered to be the core text of Confucian philosophy but then considered useful only for the young. This chapter might have contained more on the history of the different types of schools for boys—public and private and "primary" and "secondary"—and a discussion of the different types of textbooks containing lists of Chinese characters (words) that had to be memorized prior to the study of Confucian philosophy. Were there implied moral messages in the different lists and did the amount of rote learning of characters (youngsters had to chant more than 1000 words a day) have any effect on their development? [End Page 315]

Chapter 2 argues that the motif of the precocious child as new phenomenon was closely linked with the rise of the civil bureaucracy in the Han and justified the rise of preternaturally endowed children from obscure backgrounds into the highest levels of political and social power—social mobility that had been much restricted in earlier periods when aristocratic lineages dominated society. Chapter 3, on aristocratic children, emphasizes that Han commentators were deeply troubled by the spoiling of children, especially boys, in elite wealthy households. The second half of the chapter consists primarily of a discussion of what happened to imperial offspring in the first 200 years of the dynasty. It provides a good view of the dangers and vagaries of childhood in the Han palaces, though it is more political than social history.

Chapters on "Infant Abandonment," "Girls," and "The Magical Manipulation of Childhood" are insightful contributions to understanding Han social and economic conditions, and contemporary religious and moral ideas. Although the book has no illustrations or discussions of visual images in other media, such as Han tomb murals, which might have provided valuable information about the later history of Chinese children, this volume is an important contribution to the comparative study of childhood, the family, and early education.

Robin D. S. Yates
McGill University
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