Doing History of Childhood in China
While the history of childhood is attracting more scholarly attention in the Anglophone academia in the past few decades, it is still in its infancy in China. This does not mean that scholars in China are “lagging” behind the trend in the Anglophone world. Instead, it reveals different academic traditions and approaches to the question of childhood in history. Although few scholars in China label themselves as historians of childhood, substantial research has been conducted on children and childhood under the rubrics of literature, education, the history of family, and women’s and gender history.
About a decade ago, Ping-chen Hsiung, a pioneering scholar of childhood in Chinese history, reflected that Chinese Childhood Studies were particularly well-equipped to challenge the notion of a “universal childhood” as part of the ideal of “general humanity,” 1 for much of the European-American theorisation of childhood and children cannot be unproblematically transplanted and applied to the Chinese context. Building on Hsiung’s observation, this edition of China Connections aims to explore both “Chinese childhood” and the ways in which Chinese scholars approach the issue of childhood in other socio-cultural contexts.
What is the current state of the field of childhood history in China? What are the key concerns of the Chinese practitioners in this area? These questions guide the contributions to this collection. Xin Xu provides a brief overview of the study of children in ancient China, with a particular focus on the uses of material culture to reconstruct the historical reality of children in the past. Similarly, Gao Zhenyu outlines the development of childhood studies as a distinct discipline in early 20th-century China. Cai Danni, on the other hand, focuses on a more specific case: literate girls’ epistolary service in wartime China, which offers the reader an instructive window into the inner world of children during the late 1930s and the 1940s. Finally, Li Shushu explores the representation of children in contemporary Chinese and Anglophone literature to reflect on the notion of childhood innocence. Collectively, these contributions demonstrate the diversity of approaches to the study of children and childhood in China.
Geng Yushu is the Fudan-NYUSH Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai. Her research interests include print culture, gender history, children, and childhood in early 20th-century China. Email: yg930@nyu.edu