Raising China's Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, 1920s-1950s by Margaret Mih Tillman (review)

In Raising China's Revolutionaries, historian Margaret Mih Tillman places an evolving and sometimes politicized understanding of "modern childhood" at the center of China's many struggles from the 1920s to the 1950s: struggle between affinity for tradition and the need for political and economic modernization, between dependence on foreign aid and desired independence from foreign influence, and between the scholarly-theoretical approach of the Nationalist period and ideological focus of the Communists in constructing what an array of groups thought necessary and best in child-rearing, childcare, and early childhood education. Tillman is explicit from the beginning that her focus is on "the discursive construction of modern childhood and the institutional mechanism used to construct it" rather than "an anthropological study of children's perspectives" (xii). Building a coherent picture was no small task given the variety of approaches and agendas inherent in shaping Chinese children (and, indeed, China itself) during these often-chaotic decades, but Tillman succeeds in accomplishing just that.

Tillman states early on that even though "childhood, as a construct, is inherently tied to the politics of particular historical eras," there is a significant—though not absolute—uniformity of approaches and outcomes across the decades, despite changes in rhetoric, emphasis on different scholarly schools of thought, and revolutionary shifts in ideology regarding childhood (xiv)—and this claim is borne out. Key and recurring organizations and characters include the National Child Welfare Association, a philanthropic organization that engaged in child advocacy efforts and particularly emphasized children's "individual rights" (20); the Johns Hopkins- and Columbia-educated Christian, Chen Heqin, with his emphasis on indigenization of Chinese early childhood education; as well as Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries. A particular area of consistency across the entire period Tillman explores is the assumption that "the modern Chinese family needed to be regulated and supported by public institutions" (78). The balance between support and regulation varied over time and under different leaders, but there is a fundamental assumption in each period that Chinese parents would not or could not do an adequate job of child-rearing without professional, institutional, or governmental involvement—or intrusion, as some parents clearly perceived it.

An unfortunate side effect of having to present the work of disparate religious, secular, governmental, and non-governmental organizations, along with Chinese and foreign individuals who worked on child-rearing and early childhood education in the Nationalist period, is that chapters 4 and 5, in particular, are broken into many short sections with distinct section headers. This structural issue makes it difficult, at times, to get a sense of the big picture or narrative flow. This is a common problem in researching and writing about children and youth during the Nationalist period because there were so many different foreign and domestic power holders, traditional village and clan leadership, and religious and secular NGOs that did not share standard ideologies, belief systems, or approaches. The short sections disappear in chapters 6 and 7, which focus on the early years of the People's Republic. With the country unified under one government after 1949 and the foreigners expelled, there was much greater uniformity of efforts, allowing the book to have greater narrative flow and a tighter focus on goals and outcomes than on the particulars of separate groups. Nevertheless, while the competing agendas prior to 1949 lead the reader to get caught up in extensive details at times, Tillman does continually return to focus on underlying continuities across the decades and regimes in China's efforts to construct a modern Chinese childhood.

Tillman has carved out a unique spot in the literature for her work. Orna Naftali studies children and their experiences in contemporary China from an anthropological perspective; Anne Behnke Kinney's and Ping-Chun Hsiung's work focuses on children in earlier periods of Chinese history; William...