Children’s literature in China: Revisiting ideologies of childhood and agency

Abstract

In this article we consider historical and contemporary ideologies of childhood in China and critically examine notions of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ in Chinese children’s literature. We analyse the themes and knowledge that relate to relevant historical and contemporary political events and policies, and how these contribute to the production of childhoods. We focus on three images of childhoods in China: the Confucian child, the Modern child and the Maoist child. Each of the images reflects a way of seeing, a perspective about what a child ought to be and become, and what their childhood should look like. Everyday media are reflected in the texts and stories examined and portray both ‘imagined’ and ‘real-life’ narratives of children and their childhoods. The stories, and the connected power relations, represent an important link between the politics of childhood and the pedagogy associated with these politics, including large-scale state investment in the production of desired, ideal and perfect childhoods. Through such an examination of contemporary and historical children’s literature and media in China we also explore the ways in which contemporary media revitalise particular notions of child agency.

Introduction

In this article, we consider historical and contemporary mediations of childhood in China. This critical examination of notions of the ideal ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ in Chinese news media explores the emergence of particular realities and imaginations of childhood in the news through an analysis of children’s literature. Children’s literature provides a powerful tool for theorising representations of children and childhood in the news. Children’s literature mediates childhood in the news, providing both representations of childhood and ways in which those representations can, and should, be read.

Mediations of agency are of particular interest here. In the interactions within and alongside the narrative and imagery of a child’s story, in the news, children and adults engage in complex interactions of power, agency, governance and ways of feeling about and enacting these ideological productions. The notion of children’s power and their capacity to contribute to society, together with notions of children’s political agency and the capacity to be resilient in difficult circumstances, are emphasised in relation to social issues that are identified in children’s literature. While the ideas portrayed and reproduced through stories are contestable, they offer valuable sources for understanding children’s agency in China in relation to the concepts of connectedness, subversion and social transformation.

In this article we focus on three ideological childhoods in China: the Confucian child, the Modern child and the Maoist child. Each of these childhoods, and their associated mediations and images, reflect a way of seeing – a perspective about what a child ought to be and become, and what their childhood should look like. These texts and stories portray both imagined and real-life narratives of children and their childhoods. These images come from dynasty China (before 1919), Modern China (1919 to 1949) and Maoist China (1949 to 1979). Children’s literature offers valuable understandings of childhood and children’s agency in China, making abstract ideas, values and assumptions visible. When children’s literature tells stories about child protagonists, these figures are imbued with particular meanings, as representations of adult values, beliefs and assumptions about children. Stories in early childhood literature expose children to ideologies (Tesar, 2013), and fictional children represent and reproduce culture, mirroring the social and cultural expectations of children driven by adult ideology (Tesar, 2014; Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg, 2016).

We begin with an overview of the history of children’s literature in China and, in particular, hone in on particular notions of agency that were inscribed within the three periods (Confucian, Modern and Maoist), before engaging with the representations of these periods in two series of selected texts from contemporary children’s literature. The first series is a collection of government-published children’s stories, and the second is a collection of Chinese, award-winning children’s stories. In the final section, we explore the ways in which all three childhoods are evident in the news media, and function together to mediate the contemporary ‘Chinese Dream’. Keeping the fluid nature of childhood (and culture) in mind, this article explores locally developed understandings of children emerging in philosophy, literature and cultural studies that contribute to the ever-evolving field of childhood studies in China.

Chinese children’s literature and the three notions of agency

In children’s literature demonstrating the Confucian image of the child, the emphasis is on the child’s filial piety and self-cultivation. The Confucian child represents particular and enduring traditional values and assumptions about children and childhood in China. Confucianism was made an orthodoxy by the Han Dynasty over 2000 years ago (Ke, 2015). About 1000 years later, Neo-Confucianism, as a new branch of Confucianism, began to develop in the Song and Ming Dynasties. The Neo-Confucian child is morally obligated to fulfil his or her filial piety and to commit to a continuous self-cultivation process to become an ideal citizen in society. From the Neo-Confucian perspective, children’s active and central contributions to maintain harmonious social relationships support the social structure and the ultimate law of harmony. In Neo-Confucianism, children’s agency can be interpreted as a moral dimension, because children take responsibility in their social relationships as active social actors and full members of society. However, a child’s social world is pre-determined by the formula for achieving the ultimate natural law of harmony – which cannot be challenged (Ke, 2015). Neo-Confucianism integrated ideas from Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism (Tu, 2000; Zhang, 2017; Zhang and Zhang, 2016), focusing on the instruction of children in ‘primer’ texts (Bai, 2005). Neo-Confucian writers devised exemplary children in their texts, depicting desired virtues, ritualised behaviours and specified pathways for self-cultivation (Bai, 2005). For example, many well-known Confucian role models are presented in the Three Character Classics, which are worded in a rhythmic and short structure. In each, a 12-word story with detailed moral instruction is given. Zhu Xi (1130–1200), a Neo-Confucian philosopher, stated the purpose of such stories was to teach children Confucian qualities such as filial piety, duty, loyalty and honesty (Farquhar, 1999).

In 1919, the May 4 Movement, also known as the New Cultural Movement, marked a new political era in China. During this time, Confucian orthodoxy became regarded as oppressive. Children were viewed as the most oppressed group (Xu, 2013b), somewhat paradoxically, because children were not regarded as belonging to any distinct social group. By recognising children as a group, Modern Chinese society regarded childhood as having a unique and distinct nature. Accordingly, a new genre of Chinese children’s literature emerged. Notable intellectuals who contributed to Modern childhoods include Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Bing Xin (1900–1999), Feng Zikai (1898–1975) and Lu Xun (1881–1936). With the emergence of a Modern childhood, children’s literature flourished, including translated children’s books from Europe (Alice in Wonderland, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Oscar Wilde’s stories, and so on), and children’s folklore and nursery rhymes (Zhang, 2001). Picture books and children’s magazines also evolved during this time. Retaining the capacity to think and write from the child’s perspective was important for authors of children’s literature. Zhou Zuoren advocated that adults should not ‘forget the feelings from their childhood and fail to understand children’s present feelings’ (Xu, 2012: 233). Writers of children’s literature who took and valued children’s perspectives were highly political (Farquhar, 1999) at a time of significant social upheaval. Zhou Zuoren criticised the marginalisation of children in Imperial China. He claimed that, when childhood was not regarded as distinct from adulthood, either too much, or too little, was expected of children (Zhou, 1920). Hence the texts of the time established a new truth to childhood involving qualities such as curiosity and innocence (Xu, 2013a) and, at the same time, established a politics for childhood in saving the nation from the burdens of traditional Confucian orthodoxy. For Lu Xun, liberating children from the old social systems was central to necessary social change. In his famous work A Madman’s Diary, Lu Xun called for saving children to save the nation by resisting the Confucian and Imperial traditions and establishing a new democratic China (Farquhar, 1999). At the end of A Madman’s Diary, Lu Xun asks: ‘perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men? Save the children’ (Farquhar, 1999: 56). Confucianism, regarded as the source of China’s backwardness, was dismantled during that time (Xu, 2013a). Lu Xun offered a vision of children as a vital political force.

In the Maoist era (1949–1979), children were seen as more radical and revolutionary. War and class struggles were popular topics in children’s popular culture, in movies and comic books. The political tone in literature and art was set by Mao in 1942 for nearly 40 years: ‘literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part and operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy’ (Xu, 2011: 388). An article in the Chinese official newspaper, in 1966, elevated this active role of children:

Some people are afraid that teenagers and children, being young, not well-educated and inexperienced, cannot take part in the cultural revolution, which is a class struggle in the ideological sphere. This viewpoint is incorrect. The great socialist cultural revolution is of vital significance to the tempering and growth of teenagers and children. (Xu, 2011: 392)

Exemplary children during this period revealed the ideal of a proletarian child with heroic characters. Message with Feather (Jimaoxin 鸡毛信) told a story of a boy who sent a vital letter to the Chinese army during the Second World War. Because the child-protagonist successfully delivered the letter, the proletarian army won the battle in one of the Japanese invasions. The child-hero was brave, intelligent and capable. The picture of the boy protagonist in an illustrated version of this story reveals a typical visual image of the heroic child.

These different childhood constructions are complex manifestations of power played out within the normalised and desired ideas, beliefs and attitudes of dominant discourses (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005). When considering these productions of childhood and their power over children and adults, Stainton Rogers (2015) asks: ‘What ideology, worldview or political position is being promoted? What behaviour or action is being justified and what behaviour or action is being prohibited or judged as bad or unacceptable?’ (2015: 102). In childhood studies, one element of power is the idea of the child as having agency. Prout and James (2015: 7) stress that children must be ‘seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them, and of the societies in which they live’. For children, agency refers to ‘how children can behave, have influence over, act differently, challenge and contest the established generational ordering of society, or structure an ideology’ (Tesar, 2016: 4). Oswell (2013) argues that a ‘concern with the agency of children and a concern to document the transformation of children’s agency are not driven by an ideological agenda to see children’s agency everywhere or to see it as a universal, unitary phenomenon’ (2013: 280). This concern is evident in the work of Hoang and Yeoh (2015), who unsettle notions of active and inactive agency for Vietnamese children, while the work of Sen (2016) has proposed a more rebellious version of children’s agency, which values protest as action, in India. These studies challenge universal assumptions about global human agency. They contribute to the unmasking of agency in its various forms – notably as autonomous and individualised, and as contributing to a particular ‘Western’ image of agency (Wyness, 2015) and childhood (Tesar, 2016). However, few studies in China have investigated children’s agency. Naftali (2009) explores liberal notions of rights and citizenship for children’s subjectivity in Shanghai schools and homes, and examines the tension between autonomy and obedience in contemporary Chinese childhood (Naftali, 2014). Goh and Kuczynski (2009) investigate child agency within the child’s relationship with parents and grandparents in Xiamen, China. These studies focus on the autonomy of the child and reinforce a particular and universalised construction of childhood, where the child’s agency lacks contextual meaning.

Three ideologies in two series of children’s picture books

In this next section, we explore contextual meanings in the three literary constructions of childhood and children’s agency re-inscribed in contemporary literature. Increasing sales from 2005 to 2015 represented a golden decade for children’s literature in China. According to Jingdong, one of the largest online retailers, picture book sales in 2016 made up nearly 20% of overall children’s literature sales (Shanghai Century Publishing Co Ltd, 2016). As a result of a baby boom due to the two-child policy, picture books targeting early childhood readers received extensive public attention. In this section, we explore two classifications of picture books: (1) the Socialist Core Values series of picture books and (2) children’s literature from award-winning authors. We analyse a total of five books. Each book represents and engages with elements of children’s agency and reveals different ways of seeing both agency and childhood.

The Socialist Core Values series originated in Hubei province as part of recent provincial education reform. Since 2015, the Qidian Yuedu (Starting-point reading, 起点阅读) has been compulsory reading for children in regional kindergartens (3- to 6-year-olds). Each kindergarten is required to carry out three 10-minute sessions of reading activities weekly using these picture books (Hubei Provincial Department of Education, 2016). Zhu Jiaxiong, the editor of this book series, claims the series infuses early childhood education with traditional cultural heritage (Hubei Daily, 2016).

The stories in the Socialist Core Values series explore values across three dimensions: (1) national – prosperity (富强), democracy (民主), civility (文明) and harmony (和谐); (2) societal – freedom (自由), equality (平等), justice (公正) and rule of law (法治); and (3) citizen – patriotism (爱国), dedication (敬业), integrity (诚信) and friendship (友善) (China Daily, 2014).

The Socialist Core Values books include images of the Confucian and the Maoist child. In this section we briefly examine two stories that represent the Confucian ideology. The first book, Kongrong Shares Pears (孔融让梨) (Bian, 2015), comes from the well-known Neo-Confucian childhood story The Three Character Classic. At the centre of the story, there is a conflict about how to share pears among three brothers since the pears are not equal in size. As the middle child of three, Kongrong offers a solution to share the pears, while his brothers fight over the biggest pear. Kongrong’s solution results in him keeping the smallest one for himself. Kongrong shows leadership and wisdom. He explains the necessity of respect for elders and love for the young. Kongrong’s father praises his thinking and his actions at the end of the story. Underpinning Kongrong’s modesty is the Confucian virtue of humanity (ren 仁), which encompasses one’s humanity as well as the relational idea of loving others. The notions of love, care, modesty and generosity guide children in their development of a moral agency within their family and other interpersonal relationships – moral agency being a social–relational experience (Wyness, 2015).

The Confucian morals also present a child’s political agency as they contribute to the building of a harmonious society. Harmony (Hexie 和谐) is the essential value of Kongrong Shares Pears. Traditionally, harmony was, and is, seen as the ultimate natural law from a Confucian philosophical perspective. In contributing to the contemporary socialist core values, harmony is at the national level. The story identifies the relationship between a harmonious individual subjectivity and a harmonious socialist society (Liu, 2014). The back cover reinforces this relationship by highlighting that only when children learn modesty and share can everyone live happily in a harmonious society. The intent to create these levels of harmonious subjectivity and society can be seen in the approach to the child’s compulsory learning of the books in the series. Here, an ideal socialist childhood emerges through an enhanced and updated Confucian discourse. Children’s moral responsibility is extended to the political agenda of a harmonious society. The social–relational model of agency is valued; however, the subjection of that model to a broader political agenda creates limits to the experience of moral agency as the expectations are prescribed.

The combination of children’s moral and political responsibilities is also seen in Yuefei Serves the Country with Loyalty (精忠报国) (Jiao and Qidian, 2015). The book follows the story of Yuefei, who is well known for leading soldiers to defend against the invasion of the northern Jin Regime during the South Song dynasty about 1000 years ago. Yuefei grows up in a poor family with his mother. When the northern forces invade, Yuefei wants to join the defence but worries about leaving his elderly mother home alone. He faces a dilemma because, from a Confucian perspective, leaving one’s parents behind is not a filial practice. Filial piety is a precondition for patriotism, a process through which the development of the person leads to the making of the citizen (Ke, 2015). The Neo-Confucian classic The Great Learning (大学) exemplifies the process of self-cultivation for one to be human and citizen in eight steps:

Investigating things (gewu 格物), extending knowledge (zhizhi 致知), sincere thoughts (chengyi 诚意), rectifying hearts (zhengxin 正心), self-cultivation (xiushen 修身), regulating family (qijia 齐家), governing the state (zhiguo 治 国), and making the world peaceful (pingtianxia 平天下). (Ke, 2015: 122)

Yuefei has to first regulate his family relationships before he can contribute to the state. The priority for Yuefei’s filial role also aligns with the Neo-Confucian philosophy that family relationships support ultimate harmony in nature and society. It is thanks to Yuefei’s mother’s righteousness (深明大义) that the dilemma is resolved. The mother encourages Yuefei to serve his patriotic duty and tattoos ‘devotion to the country with loyalty’ (精忠报国) on his back. In this narrative, Yuefei’s mother is a cultural parenting role model, representing the virtue of choosing the nation’s good over that of the individual or family, and aligns Yuefei’s filial role with his patriotic role. This relational form of moral agency underpins his patriotic service to the nation. The key Confucian virtue of filial piety is reactivated in this book. Children’s moral responsibilities intersect with their political roles. From a Neo-Confucian perspective, when children obey parents and commit to family relationships, an ideal social harmony can be realised. The notion of filial piety is further problematised through history in the Modern and Maoist discourses. An exploration of Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King (哪吒闹海) (Chen and Qidian, 2015), one of the book collections in the socialist series, reveals the contested notion of filial piety. The story integrates both the Confucian ideal and Maoist ideology to reinforce the intersection between one’s moral and political responsibilities.

Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King (哪吒闹海) is a traditional Chinese fairytale written in the Ming Dynasty, before 1700. The story has been adapted over time. The story in the chosen selection starts with the birth of Nezha, a child of Li Jing (李靖), who is the local chief of Chentangguan town (陈塘关). When the dragon prince orders a helper to arrest local children as a sacrifice, Nezha stands up to him. Nezha kills the dragon prince and his helper, which causes trouble for Li Jing and other citizens of Chentangguan. The East Sea dragon, seeking revenge, threatens to flood the town. Nezha takes responsibility for his actions and gives his life to save the town. His master, Taiyi Zhenren, remakes his body using lotus and brings him back to life. He also gifts Nezha a pair of fire wheels and a fire spear that Nezha uses to defeat the East Sea dragon.

Nezha demonstrates Maoist images of children and represents a highly agentic, subversive child. Nezha’s rebellion against the dragons illustrates a resistance to injustice within a traditional hierarchical system. The agency of the child is, however, contingent on the acts of elders. In particular in this story, the gifting of the two weapons speaks to children’s empowerment through the actions of the master. Once bestowed with these gifts, the revolutionary and rebellious power of the child is legitimate. This form of political agency draws on Maoist ideology and shows the proletarian perspective of class struggle. The reactivated Maoist ideology represents a recent trend to re-energise the ‘red classics’. In 2004, the revolutionary films, songs and books were redefined as ‘red classics’ and became a vital patriotic element of education for Chinese children (Xu, 2013b).

Rebellion, revolution and piety are all essential components in the socialist value of justice. Nezha’s sacrifice is the result of obeying filial piety as he cannot tolerate his parents’ suffering on his account (Chen and Qidian, 2015). It emphasises Nezha’s responsibility-taking, as a filial son who is also a revolutionary, when faced with injustice. Such filial responsibility was contested in an animation of Nezha in 1979 when the father decided to give up Nezha’s life. Although the traditional cultural tension to choose between public good and personal love (DeWoskin, 1995) underpinned the father’s rationale, Nezha was disappointed. Consequently, he followed the father’s order but claimed to repay his father his life, his bones and his flesh. The idea of owing life to parents can be traced back to the Confucian text The Classic of Filial Piety, within which one’s primary piety is to protect one’s skin and hair that is given by parents. Therefore, Nezha’s sacrifice was for both collective benefits and rebellion against the oppressive social/family hierarchy. In the Socialist Core Values series, the oppressive force and the conflict between Nezha and his father disappear. The emphasis now shifts to rebellion against unfaithful governance.

The three stories from the Socialist Core Values series, as official publications of the government, describe the ideal socialist characteristics of children and childhood and represent blended Confucian and Maoist discourses. In contrast, the second group of picture books resonate with the Modern discourse. The following analysis of the two books, both by award-winning authors, A New Year’s Reunion (团圆) and The Only Child (独生子女), offer different themes of childhood. The two stories touch on complex issues in a variety of urban childhoods, expressing the authors’ hopes for children to be able to take control of their lives in difficult circumstances. Common features of childhood in the books are child innocence, hardships, hope and resilience. A child-centred and resilience approach to agency and childhood emerges.

A New Year’s Reunion was awarded the Best Children’s Picture Book at the first Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Awards in 2009, and is one of the best-sellers in the original picture books range in China’s largest online bookshop (Dangdang, 2017). Maomao, a young girl, is the main character. Maomao and her mother live in their hometown. Her father has to migrate for work, and returns home once a year during the Spring Festival (Yu and Zhu, 2008). When Maomao’s father first returns, Maomao seems to be unfamiliar with him and uncomfortable about hugging him. Later on, when Maomao wears the new clothes that her father brings her, watches him fix their house, and rides on her father’s shoulder, Maomao gradually builds a relationship with him.

Unlike the Socialist Core Values series, the story highlights the child’s view, using ‘I’ to represent Maomao’s perspective. Yu and Zhu (2008) are concerned with the child’s experience, as many contemporary Chinese children share similar childhoods to Maomao. There is a large population of left-behind children whose parents migrate and leave their families to work. In 2016, the population of left-behind children was 9,020,000, among which nearly 90% have no engagement with either of their parents and live with their grandparents (Ministry of Civil Affairs, China, 2016). While the peasant workers create wealth for society as a whole and support economic growth in rural areas by sending money back home, the massive rural-to-urban migration results in left-behind children, and political, economic, social and domestic challenges (Li, 2010). Yet Maomao’s perspective is not as a victim. Maomao is a powerful child protagonist with agency. Her capacity to express her voice and her resilience are central to Maomao’s agency. Besides expressing her wish for her father to come back next year, Maomao also employs agency in her initial resistance towards his return.

The story is, in part, significant for the way in which it engages with the child’s perspective of the father and the contextualisation of that perspective within the wider societal pressures to contribute economically to the wellbeing of the family. Maomao’s own journey in understanding teaches that separation can be overcome by the child’s agency and that the love of the family is, in part, made possible by the will of the child. The story describes the child’s ability to cope with separation. Maomao’s resilience resembles the essence of a contemporary idea of the child as both strong and innocent from Cao Wenxuan, a renowned author of children’s literature in China. Cao focuses on the necessity of experiencing various hardships, disasters and tragedies and he considers these hardships as essential lessons to develop mentally strong and morally innocent children (Xu, 2013a). The focus on resilience and children’s inner strength offers a new approach to understanding agency.

The notion of a resilient child symbolises the Modern discourse of childhood. The Modern intellectual’s call for childhood as a cure for societal ills and national progress can be seen in Maomao’s agency. If the desired social responsibilities for Kongrong, Yuefei and Nezha are prescribed in the Socialist values, the expectation for Maomao is to elicit changes. The concept that children are responsible for creating a particular kind of society remains – although it takes a different form.

A similar, child-centred approach to address agency and childhood is found in The Only Child (独生小孩). The story unfolds in a wordless picture book. A prologue and epilogue are added to assist readers to understand the story and its context. The images in the story depict a young girl’s experience of getting lost, inspired by the author’s childhood experience as the only child in her family born in the 1980s. In the prologue it is observed that, while the story uses fantasy, it tells of real childhoods in China. Starting from 1979, the one-child policy dominated Chinese family planning for over 30 years and resulted in a large population of children born in the 1980s and early 1990s being the only child in their families. The images depict the social and economic context through mixed landscapes: a condominium on one side, traditional houses on the other, and the chimneys of industrial factories in the distance. The new two-child policy of 2016 ended the one-child generation – a generation which has been labelled ‘the lonely generation’.

The author portrays a strong sense of loneliness, including picture-book images of a child’s boredom and a desire to have her grandmother’s company as she browses over a photo album. With both parents out at work, the child left alone at home decides to go out to find her grandmother. From here, an imaginative adventure starts. The drawings adopt the child’s vision of her journey. The monochrome style and smooth lines create a sense of tenderness, innocence and purity.

As with the alternative readings of separation in the story of Maomao, in The Only Child (独生小孩), alternative readings of loneliness are presented that offer more open interpretations of the child’s agency when compared to constructions of the vulnerable child. One epilogue writer highlights the richness of loneliness (Sanchuan, in Guo, 2015). Another epilogue author invites readers to question whether loneliness erodes the heart or nurtures the soul, suggesting that this is dependent on the hope in one’s mind, the capacity to love, or a guardianship that is always there like a deer, a shadow, a tree, or a star (Chen, in Guo, 2015). A key message of resilience emerges and this is evident in the last scene when the child holds a toy deer which is also the guide to lead her way to grandmother’s house. The deer is a metaphor for agency. The power of imagination enables the child to overcome the challenges of childhood, to be resilient and to embrace loneliness and love.

Both the lonely child and the separated child are influenced by particular societal challenges. Yet both stories also express hope, represented by children who are given power over their circumstances. The search for hope resonates with Lu Xun’s work in 1919 (republished in 1925) as he hoped that Chinese youth would break away from coldness . . . act or voice out . . . Make light like a firefly in the dark. Do not wait for a beacon. If there is no longer a beacon from now on, he would be the only light.

The analysis of the five children’s books contributes to an understanding of the complex construction of both childhood and child agency. The Confucian philosophical value of connectedness between the self and others, the modern idea of children being both innocent and capable, and the Maoist notion of a child’s subversive power offer valuable sources to explore children’s agency. The chosen stories reveal the politics of childhood embedded in children’s literature (Tesar, 2013; Zornado, 2001). Each story reveals a way of thinking about childhood and agency that contributes to how both the child and the adult make sense of the cultural and political construction of childhood. As such, each children’s story offers an approach to making sense of contemporary constructions of childhood. The final section of this article draws upon the children’s stories to engage with such constructions in the Chinese news media.

Discussion: Niuniu and the Chinese Dream

The three periods and their historical discourses (Confucian, Modern and Maoist) remain influential in contemporary China, as evidenced in children’s literature, and they profoundly influence childhood in China (Zhu and Zhang, 2008). The inter-relationship among these discourses is essential to China. Each discourse builds upon the previous, as specific notions of children and childhood are problematised, rejected and/or enhanced. In this final section, we explore evidence of each discourse in the news media through one news item that portrays the inter-relationship of each childhood discourse. The purpose here is to show, not only that childhood fictions map onto childhood realities, but that fictional accounts of children and childhood are productive for the study of childhood in the media.

In April 2019, a video was uploaded to the internet of a mother spanking her three-year-old daughter, and child model, Niuniu. The spread of the video resulted in a wide debate about parenting and childhood, largely centred around the phenomenon of child models. The debate led to moves from local government to legislate for the rights of child models. As a result, new legislation was passed to regulate child modelling activities. The incident is now included in the 10 typical cases for promoting, strengthening and innovating child protection and social management issued by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (Procuratorate Daily, 2019).

In the news media, much attention was directed towards the child modelling industry. For instance, the government-owned Workers’ Daily reported on the highly lucrative nature of the industry and the poor working conditions for children (Workers’ Daily, 2019). The Guang Ming Daily reported the urgent need for further legislative reform due to concerns of sexualisation of children in contemporary media. This article made specific reference to the work of Neil Postman in warning of lost innocence and the disappearance of childhood (Guang Ming Daily, 2019). In contrast, a privately owned studio that belongs to Sohu News (Xiaozhou, 2019) published more intimate and detailed coverage regarding the life of Niuniu and her family. This latter story reveals a complexity of relationships between child, family and world that evoke notions of innocence and vulnerability, morality and duty, and resistance and agency.

Niuniu is presented as a symbol of an idealised child and childhood. Her features engender her as an ideal child model – a performance of innocence and purity. Her ‘perfection’ is more than just in her appearance. She is characterised as the perfect child in her behaviour within her family. She shows all the characteristics of the dutiful child who commits to her role diligently and intelligently, and who cares for others. All the characteristics, that is, until she refuses to perform for the camera and expresses that she no longer likes modelling. The mother explains that both hard work and hardship are valued by the family and are beneficial for Niuniu. Perhaps it is for this reason that Niuniu’s refusal to work eventually resulted in the mother hitting her – an action that the story interprets as having far greater impact on the child modelling industry than it has done for the child. Niuniu is described as having a loving relationship with her family despite her rejection of her work and the punishment meted out by her mother.

In this widely interpreted news, each of the three discourses of childhood and childhood agency are evident. Niuniu, her family and her society are in a sense acting out each of the three discourses at the same time. And at the same time then, this reality is performing various fictions. The fictions do not simply help to understand the reality, they create the way in which the reality is perceived and the ways in which to respond. The complex nature of childhood is symbolic in Niuniu’s performance of Kongrong, Nezha, Maomao et al. Niuniu is agentic through the enacting of her duty to family; through her symbolising of innocence; and through her rebellion. In each of these interpretations of her story, her agency can be seen from her own perspective, as ‘her own’ in a sense, at the same time as it can be seen as agency from an adult’s perspective; that is, as constructed by and for her society. Her story contributes to a particular kind of society as the child responsible for conserving social traditions and realising social agendas (see Arendt, 1961) – her story is also the story of Kongrong, Yuefei and Nezha. Niuniu is an agent for significant societal transformation. This reactivation of the image of the Maoist child shows a renewed commitment to socialist ideology through the subversive agency of the child (see Bi, 2003, on the waning of Maoist childhood ideas).

Her story is, at the same time, not her story. It is not her story because it is a story already told in various fictions. Each story of childhood lends itself to a way of making sense of Niuniu’s story as a story to tell in the media. Niuniu’s story is also not her story because, like the examples in children’s literature, the story is employed by the media and by authorities to construct particular childhoods. Niuniu’s story is as much a story told by adults as are the stories of Yuefei, Kongrong, or Maomao.

Taken together, for this purposeful construction of childhood, all these stories contribute to the activated images of the Confucian child and the Maoist child that energise the current discourse of the ‘Chinese Dream’ project under Xi Jinping’s leadership (Gow, 2017). Niuniu symbolises this renewal project through her portrayal of each of the discourses at the same time. And, in particular, she can be seen as emblematic of that which makes each discourse a discourse of child agency. As such, Niuniu’s love, duty and rebellion operate as an abiding dream for a nation and as an abiding image of the complexity of relationships that is childhood.

Conclusion

In this article we have explored three approaches to child agency that produce particular kinds of children and particular constructions of childhood. Each approach has been shown to be reactivated in contemporary children’s literature. The reactivation drives an educational dream in China that draws from and maintains each tradition, and is reflected in the news media.

The question remains: how much ‘real’ agency and capacity do children have to effect change? There are important tensions to explore between realities and imaginations, and we would argue here, reimaginations, regarding the agency of childhood. These tensions are evident in the news media in the competing ideas of vulnerability, innocence and rights. The news media reveal that children experience harsh realities and that these realities conflict with contemporary imaginations of childhood. At the same time, the reality of the news stories invites us to consider that there is a real agency being expressed here through childhood.

Ultimately, contemporary reactivation of past images of children and the conceptualisation of children’s agency cannot be separated from adult culture and ideology. The challenge for adults within their cultural and ideological contexts is to make space for children to engage in questions concerning agency – a clearing away of the ‘adult-clutter’, so to speak. This making of space, or clearing away, can involve the child’s very questioning of the childhoods in children’s literature. The child’s questions develop through the child’s imagination, and in the child’s imagination, children’s literature is very real. Hence, it is important to recognise in this question over real agency that real agency is entirely an idea that is essential to the practice of agency.