Er Tong Yu Zhan Zheng: Guo Zu, Jiao Yu Ji Da Zhong Wen Hua [Children and War: National Education and Mass Culture] by Xu Lanjun (review)

The childhood concept discovered by modern Chinese Literature at the beginning of the twentieth century and its romantic idealization became obsolete during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Childhood had to be reinvented.

The author of this study takes on this topic neglected by Chinese literary studies by looking at discourses about childhood as a cultural construct and by analyzing contemporary Chinese literature for children, including primers and textbooks, plays, magazines, games of war, literary works by children and with child-protagonists, comics, and films. By situating the concept of childhood in China within the discourses of nation building, war propaganda, education, and mass culture, Xu offers an insightful historical contextualization.

In her introduction, she assesses the state of cultural history childhood studies and observes that in China the concept of childhood is closely connected to the political discourse of nation building, which focuses on the backwardness and need for education of peasants and children alike. War is supposed to provide them with a collective experience and a common cultural identity, which prepare the ground for the foundation of the state.

Working for the propaganda corps, children often produced texts addressed to adults. The boundaries between literature for children and adults, textbooks, propaganda, and literature merge during the war years. The author takes this into consideration by drawing on a wide range of sources.

Chapter 1 describes the normalization of war experiences through textbooks. Bookstores and publishing houses distributed war-relevant everyday-knowledge in the form of education manuals, teaching material, and literature. Book series such as “Education of Children in Times of War” advocated physical fitness for resistance, national consciousness, and the spirit of sacrifice while recommending “games for the defense of the state”.

Children were no longer merely considered underage consumers of child-friendly publications, but as potential agents of resistance. The necessary nationalism should be inculcated through a collective sense of threat, leading to the key concept of national salvation education in primary schools.

Unrelated to this state-induced sense of terror is the perspective of individual children suffering from anxiety in the face of war and violence. Striking examples are the “Autobiography of a young refugee”, the published diary of the thirteen-year-old girl Wu Danian chronicling the years 1937–1938, or comics drawn by children, portraying war and published in the Shanghai children’s magazine “Chinese Children”.

Chapter 2 looks at the discovery of village kids and their instrumentalization for propaganda purposes. They became the target for textbooks specifically designed for rural residents and children in border territories, celebrating physical training and labor as well as ideological warfare. Elementary schools in the border districts were instructed to perform military exercises and to train children for war-relevant activities. In the “Soviet zones” in the Jiangxi province, “child-worker-corps” for children of workers and peasants were set up. Children’s magazines such as “Be prepared!” and “Communist Primer” promoted the political participation of child-corps and encouraged children to win over their parents to the cause of the revolution.

Literature was also called upon to reflect on the economic and political instrumentalization of children. The short story “A child’s speech” by Xiao Hong, which describes the everyday effort of young “auxiliary soldiers” to support war propaganda, is a typical example.

In the 1930s, many schools had closed and refugee children were left to their own devices. Reform pedagogues thus advocated an “education through life” and celebrated children as “young teachers” of the backward rural population. They were encouraged to join theater and propaganda groups. Chapter 3 presents the “Xin’an Traveling Troupe” and the “Children’s Drama Troupe” as examples of such child-led groups, which travelled the country in the name of war propaganda...