Children’s culture and society in ChinaAn Oxford bibliography

IntroductionA Pre-modern history of Chinese Children and ChildhoodThe Child as a ‘Sign of Value’Modern Histories of Childhood and YouthChildren’s Cultural TextsEducationAnthropologyPolitics and PsychologyMedia UseRural ChildrenAnnual Reports.

INTRODUCTION

The study of childhood is crucial to understanding contemporary Chinese society and culture. Successive generations of childhood since the mid twentieth century have been given the burden of succession – of revolution, of reform and now of globalization and national pride. They have been involved in wars as child soldiers, they have found themselves at the forefront of internal struggles for the very meaning of culture, and they have been assigned the task of taking Chinese science and technology to the pinnacle of modernity. Chinese society expects a lot from its children. Nonetheless, there are relatively few academic studies of the subject, although that situation is changing in line with the increasing academic focus on Chinese media, an area where younger generations are leading the way. In the following bibliography we have sought to provide an account of key foci in the study of childhood, whilst also extending the reach of the works cited to certain writings on ‘youth’. Childhood is a difficult category to pin down as cultural and social norms can mean that a sixteen year old is a child in one place, but a working adult somewhere else. Here we keep to the Convention of the Rights of a Child (1988), of which China is a signatory, and mark infancy up to 2, and childhood up to 17 years of age. Yet, we have still included titles that are concerned with youth over 17 years of age (approximately), when those discussions are also pertinent to an overall study of generational change. The five sub categories that we offer below are not exhaustive, but they tease out important thematics: education, media, political movements and discourses, and cultural texts and practices directed at the young. The overwhelming impression is one of a doubled contradiction. The study of the child entails a focus on the future, on abrupt change and on China’s potential in the world. At the same time, it leads us back to longstanding discourses of social value, discourses which have been forged in the political philosophies of the Confucian tradition but which have developed through the governmental necessities of imperial systems, whereby education underpinned an imperial bureaucracy that spread across the imperial sphere of influence. And indeed, the Book of Rites is clear the job of a ten year old is to study. Yet, it was childhood that became the working metaphor for twentieth century critiques of that tradition, whereby lost childhoods such as of that of the peasant Runtu in Lu Xun’s seminal short story ‘Old Home’ (first published in the radical

magazine New Youth, 1921), were taken as causes and effects of an impoverished and emasculated China.

A PRE-MODERN HISTORY OF CHINESE CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD

This is the shortest of our categories but we recommend that readers re-visit the Classics, which were after all, the founding texts for every educated child (Bai, 2005). Boys were the prime target of this education, so one must read with that very significant caveat in mind. Not all dynasties have yet received equal treatment but there are valuable and ambitious works that consider the Han (Kinney, 2004), and the Sung onwards (Kinney, 1995; Hsiung, 2005, Saari, 1990). Imperial childhood challenges the categorisations of the child and childishness that contemporary readers may expect. Childhood was in some senses a permanent sociological state for grown children of living family partiarchs, whilst girlhood is alternatively seen as a safe space for children who did not need to excel at their lessons (Hsiung) – for boys the ‘tender’ age was over by 6 or 7 years, and as a painfilled preparation for marriage and physical abuse (Wang Ping, 2000).

Hsiung, Ping-chen. A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005.

This historical research attempts a history of infancy and early childhood (from birth to age seven or eight) in the late imperial period (mainly in Ming and Qing dynasties). The author points out that the notion of “child” in Chinese society can not only be understood in a biophysical sense, but also can be seen be seen and treated “a social status”, “a familiar role”, and “the embodiment of the virtue or quality of innocence” (Preface). Hsiung explores the physical condition, the social life, and the socio-cultural construction and philosophical conceptualisation of childhood in the said imperial period. Drawing on multiple texts, including pedagogical material, biographical and family records, drawings about children, her research is a worthwhile attempt to redeem childhood for pre-Qing historiography.

Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.Wang Ping’s focus is on the practice of footbainding rather than childhood per se. The wrenching descriptions of the process alert the reader to the grim fact that the pain started in early childhood and continued over decades – the bound foot was a lasting link between disfigured youth and crippled old age. We include this as just one publication on footbinding, as the practice defined the end of mobility for so many children.

Saari, Jon L. Legacies of Childhood: Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990

According to Hsiung (2005:6), Sarri’s book “remains the only monographic treatment on childhood experience in Chinese history”. It focuses on the changing historical experience of childhood in “a time of crisis”. Dealing with the cusp of the dynastic era, Saari’s book is an important contribution to a continuous narrative of childhood,

youth and radical change over more than a century of Chinese politics. His attention to the last generation of ‘imperial’ children is a perspicacious work of scholarship in a time when we are considering generations who are the last Maoists, the last reformists, the 80hou (1980s) generation and so on.

Kinney, Anne B., ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.

This volume exmines the ideological and cultural aspects of history that have shaped the transformation of Chinese views of childhood from the Han Dynasty to the opening phase of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than providing a comprehensive, chronological hisotry of Chinese childhood, contributors of this collection from various disciplinary background (e.g., literature, history, philosophy, medicine) explore the ways in which the key issues, such as filial piety, ancestral cults, domination of the patrilineage and traditional norms of gender hierarchy shaped and conceptualized of childhood in Chinese culture.

Kinney, Anne B. Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004As her earlier book demonstrated, Kinney is a consummate historian of childhood, and she brings this skill to bear in a detailed excavation of the Han dynasty, an era that she believes truly embraced the concept of childhood. Kinney offers historical triangulations where these are available in visual and textual records, and is astute in her constructions of how childhood was defined by maternal education, just as well-born women’s role in the household came to be defined by their success in shaping the moral contours of their children. This book gives substance to an early formulation of the moral-education-parenting/Party matrix that has been re-invented a number of times in Chinese social worlds.

Bai, Li-min, Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and their Primers in Imperial China, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005.The value of this study is that it gives some useful nuance to the notion of a classical education in Imperial China. Bai traces the several kinds of Confucian education promulgated at different times and for various political reasons from the Han dynasty onwards. It is interesting, for instance, to note that education in the Ming-Qing was occasionally extended to the rural classes, and that some access to learning was available to well-born girls. Crucially, this book reminds us that education tells us as much about the educators as the putative students.

Bai, Li-min, “Childhood at Play: a Childhood Beyond the Confucian Shadow’, Childhood, Feb. 2005, 12: 9-32. This is a shorter piece that focuses on playtime. What might toys and games tell us about how childhood exceeded the strict expectations of a Confucian education and a filial life? The article is also methodologically valuable as it reminds all readers that in order to understand play one must be prepared t re-articulate what play means in a time and place different from that which prompts one’s own modern conceptions of the term.

THE CHILD AS A SIGN OF VALUE

The overwhelming rationale for modern childhood value is parental affection, but that is not its only source – for the idea of the child has long been negotiated between human value, use value, spiritual value, and symbolic value. As Anagnost (2008) argues, the ‘sign of the child’ works across social quality, dynastic and familial succession, and educational achievement. The importance of education is such that we have a separate category for that topic. Here we bring together studies that link childhood, explicitly, to formations of political value (Wylie, 1962; Donald, 1999), social quality, national pride, collective subjectivity (Helmutt, 1963; Chen, 1988), and the mediated self (Liu, 2008, 2010).

Anagnost, Ann. "Imaging Global Future in China: The Child as a Sign of Value." In Figuring the Future: Globalization and Temporalities of Children and Youth, edited by Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2008.

In this article, in which Anagnost traces the history of children as a sign of value prior to the reform era, the author argues that the child is a renewed sign of value in relation to the national culture characterized by a market economy. For her, child as a site crystalizes how globalization, with its discursive practice and knowledge formations, affects national and personal futures. She highlights the new agency of the mother figure who is in charge of the child’s domestic education, the process of commodification of childhood largely cultivated and shaped by “quality” discourse (suzhi), and the danger that comes with the regimentation of childhood. She writes: “[T]he Child becomes a site of speculative investment in global futures (in the market-inflected meaning of this word)’.

Chin, Ann-ping. Children of China: Voices from Recent Years. New York: Knopf, 1988.

This anthropological project, which is based upon fieldwork conducted in multiple sites in China in 1979 and 1984 respectively, draws on a Confucian and Daoist concerns of the self vis-à-vis others, such as families, friends, neighbours, teachers, society as a whole, nature, history and tradition. Chin observes that in stark opposition to the Western perspective, a child of traditional China is ‘born into a web of human relatedness; he is a link in the human nexus’ (18-20). This becomes her point of departure to explore Chinese children’s perception of self in the 1980s through numerous interviews with schoolchildren and university students.

Wylie, Margaret. Children of China. Hong Kong: Dragonfly Books, 1962. This early book is interesting given its direct access to the 1950s and 60s. Wylie examines various aspects of the lives of children who were under the close supervision and direct control of the Party-State. She questions the overriding political character inscribed in the education and upbringing of children under the Communist Party-State.

Hooper, Beverley. Youth in China. London: Penguin Books, 1986.Two decades later, Bev Hooper wrote one the defining 1980s account of youth in China. Largely drawing upon academic journals and popular magazines she collected during two research trips to China in 1982 and 1983-4, but also informed by the experience of her student days in China in the mid 1970s. One of the distinctive features of this book is that this study casts light upon the multifaceted issues, such as gender, class and hierarchical rural-urban division that taken together complicate issues relating to youth.

Hellmut, Wilhelm. "The Image of Youth and Age in Chinese Communist Literature." The China Quarterly 13 (1963): 180-94.

This article traces the image of youth and age in Chinese communist literature from the May Fourth Movement to Mao, with an account of youth and age in the classic texts in Imperial China. It highlights the discourse by and for youth in the early twentieth century, focusing on writers including Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Bing Xin, Ding Ling, and Chen Shuhua. Wilhelm argues that, by contrast, after the Communist take-over in 1949, youth has been degraded from an image into a slogan”.

Donald, S. ‘Children as Political Messengers: Art, Childhood and Continuity’, Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald eds. Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999: 79-100.This chapter considers the deployment of images of children in the service of State and Party narratives. The posters included in the essay ‘include art for children as well as art about children. ‘ (79) The essay is interested in the visual continuities between the Cultural Revolution and subsequent periods, and positions children as political messengers.

Liu, Fengshu. Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the Self. London: Routledge, 2010.

This study, which provides a systematic overview of urban youth’s experience of Internet usage, explores their perceptions of self against socio-cultural transformation in the Internet age. The dynamic tension that obtains within youth subjectivity characterizes what the author refers to as China’s “dual modernity”.

Liu, Fengshu. "Constructing the Autonomous Middle-Class Self in Today’s China: The Case of Young-Adult Only-Children University Students." Journal of Youth Studies 11, no. 2 (2008): 193-212.

In this paper, Liu explores young-adult only-children university students striving for a middle-class lifestyle. They either embarked upon a further pursuit of their academic studies or join the Party and take the Civil Servants’ Examination. Liu’s claims reveals that young people have adopted an individualised approach, displaying a neoliberal subject formation with little reference to the espoused socialist-collectivist values.

MODERN HISTORIES OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

The modern era in China is closely associated with the emancipation of youth through the May 4th movement in 1919. Although ‘youth’ and childhood are not at all the same in this context, it is nonetheless vital to consider how concepts of both were worked through and imagined in relation one to another in this period and since (Chen 1915; Chen YF 2002; Jones, 2002). The works selected for inclusion here identify the continuities as well as the disjunctures across a century of renewal and struggle (Chi, 1948; Pringshelm, 1962; Weber, 2000; Chen, 2007; Song 2009). We also include a short list on works pertaining to youth, as these should be read in conjunction to discussions on the deployment of childhood in the public arena.

Jones, Andrew F. "The Child as History in Republican China: A Discourse on Development." Positions: east asia cultures critique 10, no. 3 (2002): 695-727.

This article constructs a cultural history of child in Republican China. Jones presents a modernist conceptualisation of the categorical child shaped by a child development discourse that is closely imbricated with national transformation, pedagogy, and the May Fourth “business of enlightenment” (716).

Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, Jinggao qingnian (敬告青年), Wusi yundong wenxuan (五四运动文选). Beijing:Sanlian shudian, [1915]1979: 1-7.

In the inaugural issue of the May Fourth journal New Youth in 1915, Chen Duxiu published an influential article titled “Call to Youth” (jinggao qingnian). Chen calls upon youth to pursue the mission to steer the entire nation’s destiny. Chen suggests that, in order to achieve this, youth must develop several fundamental capacities. They must be independent rather than enslaved, progressive rather than conservative, motivated rather than negative, global rather than local, practical rather than nihilistic, and scientific rather than imaginative.

ChenYingfang 陈映芳, Zai juese yu fei juese zhijian: Zhongguo de qingnian wenhua (在角色与非角色之间：中国的青年文化). Nanjing: Nanjing renmin chubanshe, 2002.

In this work, Chen Yingfang first differentiates the notion of children from ‘youth’. For her, while the former is firmly based upon the notion of generation that links to Confucian family ethics, the latter, a social category based upon age, did not appear until the emergence of China’s modern education system at the turn of twentieth century. Adopting a sociological approach, this work sees “youth” as oscillating between playing and not playing various but expected social roles.

ChenYingfang 陈映芳, “Qingnian” yu Zhongguo de shehui bianqian (“青年”与中国的社会变迁), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2007.

In this sociological study, Chen Yingfang locates three dominant archetypes of modern youth in the periods of major social change that have emerged since its “birth” at the turn of twentieth century: youth as activists from the 1920s to the 1940s; youth as revolutionaries in the Maoist era (from 1949 to the late 1970s), and the deconstructed youth of the reform era (from the 1980s to the early 1990s).

Cockain, Alex. Young Chinese in Urban China. Routledge Studies on China in Transition. London: Routledge, 2011.

Drawing significantly on ethnographic research data collected between 2005 and 2010, as well as on a variety of interdisciplinary scholarly workes (sociology, media studies, anthropology), Cockain intensively examines the tension between descriptions of the effects of socio-cultural transformation in contemporary China and a more complicated and ambivalent account of youth’s experience of having grown up amidst this profound transformation.

Song, Mingwei. "The Taming of the Youth: Discourse, Politics, and Fictional Representation in the Early PRC." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 9, no. 2 (2009): 108-38.

This article examines the Maoist discourse on youth through drawing on a comparison between Yang Mo’s novella Song of Youth (1958) and Wang Meng’s Long Live Youth (1953, published in 1979). Song considers youth as a symbolic figure, an extended metonym if you like, that has had a significant impact on the conceptions of Chinese nationhood and modernity. He argues that the former falls into the genre of socialist Bildungsroman that aims to promote “correct” ideological thinking, while the latter disrupts the linear narrative of personal growth in the process becoming politically problematic.

Weber, Ian G. "Shanghai Youth’s Strategic Mobilization of Individualistic Values: Constructing Cultural Identity in the Age of Spiritual Civilization." Intercultural Communications Studies X, no. 2 (2000): 23-46.

This study, which draws upon interviews the author conducted in Shanghai in the 1990s, explores youth’s interpretation of individualism and collectivism in the 1990s through their discussion of the TV drama “Beijingers in New York”. The study suggests that: “these youth are strategic users of television. They absorb and mobilize individualistic values of ambition and progress, change, wealth, and materialism within a framework of collectivist values of filial piety, responsibility, harmony, and sacrifice for pragmatic purposes relating to personal, business, educational, and social goals” (23).

Chin, Ai-Li S. "Some Problems of Chinese Youth in Transition." The American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (1948): 1-9.

Through analysing a collection of letters published in an “advice column” of a Shanghai periodical published in 1941, this early sociological study explores the problems of Chinese youth in order to understand the Chinese family and society in transition. The author argues that the “youth of China experience two major problems upon reaching adulthood: revolt against the parental generation and a lack of accepted patterns of behavior” (8).

Pringsheim, Klaus H. "The Functions of the Chinese Communist Youth Leagues (1920-1949)." The China Quarterly 12 (1962): 75-91.

This paper traces the history of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Youth league and examines its social and political functions.

YOUTH

This subsection hints at the wealth and range of material pertaining to youth, broadly defined as late teens into early 20s, and closely associated with forms of political struggle and Chinese national renewal (Chow, 1960; Kirby, 1965; Wasserstrom 1991). Modernism and modernity are also linked to youth in China in relation to both the early twentieth century and the anti Japanese movements (Israel, 1966; Li, 1994). Studies range to the present day explosion of youth confidence, which is married to concerns about continuing foreign interventions in Chinese affairs (Zhao, 2002). The subject of gender is always central to debates on new China,and is generally cast through the prism of the Modern Girl (Stevens, 2002). We have listed rather older texts, not because there are not many excellent newer studies, but in order to direct readers to resources which may underline the longstanding attention to this topic in Chinese research.

Kirby, E. Stuart, ed. Youth in China. Hong Kong: Dragonfly Books, 1965.Kirby, who edits this book, stresses in the Preface that the works therein aim to contribute the “systematic, sustained or thorough study of the problems of the youth in mainland China” (i). He argues that: “The youth are probably the decisive element in the outcome of the great Communist experiment over large stretches of the globe today” (original emphasis).

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Wasserstrom’s book provides a detailed history of student protests in Shanghai from the turn of the twentieth century to 1949. Wasserstrom innovatively connects politics with theatre, e.g., protests as theatre and students as political actors, and maps out how student movements have shaped the country’s revolutions and political culture. The book focusses on the Warlord era (1911-1927) and the Nationalist period (1927-1949). The Epilogue re-addresses the student movements between 1986 and 1989.

Israel, John. Student Nationalism in China, 1927-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Based on primary sources gathered from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo and America, this historical study investigates the changing relationships between students, most of whom were educated youth, and Chinese nationalism and nationhood during the ten year revolution (1927 to 1937). Israel maps out a trajectory of student nationalism during this decade, manifested in events such as the Manchurian Crisis (1931-1932), the December Ninth Movement (1935-1936), and the country’s endeavors towards establishing a United Front (1936-1937).

Li, Lincoln. Student Nationalism in China, 1924-1949. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.

In this historical study, Li explores the roles of the key educational organizations – namely, the Whampoa Military Academy established by the Nationalist Party in the 1920s and the Anti-Japanese Resistance University established by the Communist Party in the 1930s – in shaping students as a political force and fuelling student nationalism between 1924 and 1949.

Zhao, Dingxin. "An Angle on Nationalism in China Today: Attitudes among Beijing Students after Belgrade 1999." The China Quarterly, no. 172 (2002): 885-905.

Based on a survey of 1211 students and interviews with 62 informants conducted in three elite Beijing universities four months after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, the author demonstrates that there is no preponderance of anti-US nationalism among China’s elite student population. Zhao suggests that the anger expressed by the students is momentary, and that they see the US as a superpower rather than as an enemy.

Chow, T. T. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960.

This influential study foregrounds the May Fourth Movement mainly as an intellectual revolution; as well, the author examines the role of the country’s student and their organisations in details within the Movement.

Stevens, Sarah E. "Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China." Feminist Formations 15, no. 3 (2003): 82-103.

This article investigates two cultural figures, i.e., New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China (1911-1949), while the former represents a positive view of linear modernity embodying the hope for the future of the nationhood, the latter is manifested either in a self-absorbed woman who searching for subjectivity or in a dangerous femme fatale. The representation of these two figures speaks for the hope, anxiety, pleasure and danger of modernity, as well as for the contested tensions and power within the construction of modernity.

See Modern China and positions:east asia cultures critique for numerous additional resources.

CHILDREN’S CULTURAL TEXTS

Children’s texts include textbooks and primers – as much literature for young people is pedagogic (Bai, 2005; Farquhar, 1999; Hu, 2012). The pedagogic mode is also evident in television and film (Donald, 2005; Zhang 2005; Zheng, 2009; Ma 2011). Works on popular music (de Kloet, 2010) are also relevant as older teenagers are more interested in this type of media than in texts directed at them. There are analyses of how children are represented in film and why (Donald, 2000), but we have maintained a focus in this section on the use of media by younger people rather than the use of child protagonists for other interests.

de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.

In this work, de Kloet examines China’s new generation of musicians and fans who came of age after the mid-nineties, those he refers to as China’s “dakou generation”.. In particular, de Kloet explores “rock mythology”, a notion charged with artistic hierarchies, in a transational context that sees Chinese musicians labeled as “mere copycats”.

Farquhar, Mary A. Children's Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.

In this groundbreaking book, the author explores the major debates surrounding modern children’s literature (shaonian ertong wenxue) in relation to revolution and modernism. Extending her enquiry from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong, Farquhar suggests that children’s literature has emerged as a serious political concern and that children continue – through the cultural performances of childhood – to embody the hope for the future.

Bai, Limin. Shaping the Chinese Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China, The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2005This book offers a detailed history of the production of primers, from the Han period until the late Qing. It is a survey work that covers a great deal of ground and will be a good basis for several more in-depth studies.

Zhang Zhilu 张之路. Zhongguo shaonian ertong dianyingshi lun (中国少年儿童电影史论). Beijing: Beijing dianying chubvanshe, 2005.

Zhang Zhilu, a renowned children’s writer, provides a history of Chinese children’s films from 1922 to 2004. He defines “Children’s films”, and examines it through a chronological narrative: children’s films before the establishment of the PRC (1922-49), in the “Seventeen Years” period (1949-65), during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), in the early reform era (1977-79), in the eighties (1980-1989), nineties (1990-99) and in the early twenty-first century (2000-04).

Zheng Huanhuan 郑欢欢. Ertong dianying: ertong shijie de yingxiang biaoda (儿童电影：儿童世界的影像表达). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2009.

This book investigates three genres of children’s films produced in the post-1949 China: war-themed, middle-high school, and fantasy. In particular, Zheng focuses upon the historical, aesthetic and ideological forces that shaped the transformation of the respective genres of Chinese children’s films.

Ma Li 马力, ed. Zhongguo ertong dianying sanchongzou: Wenhua, yishu, shangpin (国儿童电影三重奏:文化 艺术 商品• • ). Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanseh, 2011.

The author examines Chinese children’s films made mainly in the reform era (post 1979) through three lines of inquiry, the cultural, the artistic and commercial.

Donald, Stephanie H. Public Secrets, Public spaces: Cinema and Civility in China, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

This book includes several references to childhood in Chinese film of the 1980s and early 1990s. It considers children and film under the rubrics of national publicness, public discourse, and whiteness.

Donald, Stephanie H. Little Friends: Children's Film and Media Culture in China. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

This interdisciplinary approach to children’s films and media culture in contemporary China aspires to engage with the growing debate surrounding children and media worldwide. With a particular focus on the perception-end of films and education in progress, the book foregrounds the interests and experiences of Chinese children.

Hu Lina 胡丽娜. Dazhong chuanbo shiyu xia zhongguo dangdai ertong wenxue zhuanxing yanjiu (大众传媒视阈下中国当代儿童文学转型研究). Beijing” Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2012.

This interdisciplinary study examines the transformation of children’s literature that occurred in the post-1978 reform era through the lens of media. Hu analyses the emergence of new forms of children’s literature attributable to the changed nature of media ecologies of publication:t rans-media distribution and consumption,

See also The Chinese Journal of Communication, The Journal of Children and Media, and Childhood for many other useful and contemporary reports and analyses.

EDUCATIONThe number of works on education is too large to adequately sample here. The few that we have included draw on other thematics in works cited above (nationalism,

succession, desire for betterment and so on). We have also tried to maintain an historical perspective in the works selected for inclusion. Thus we include an account of the educational reformers of the late nineteenth centiury (Bai, 2001, 2008), the Mao and post-Mao era (Pepper, 1978 and 1980) as well as more recent accounts of educational reform and praxis (Kipnis 2001, 2011; Kwong, 2004, 2011). As Bai indicates most clearly (2008), textbooks are important documents in the ongoing history of childhood as they allow the social historian to trace the explicit ways in which the child is subjectified within a national or imperial vision. In particular, Bai highlights that the nationalist content in these textbooks emphasised the racial perspective as education would bring about the “betterment of [the] race”. Children, in this sense, embodied the hope to improve the Chinese race and to build a new China through education. Questions of betterment and quality are also emphasised by Kipnis through an anthropological lens.

Bai, Limin. "Children and the Survival of China: Liang Qichao on Education before the 1898 Reform." Late Imperial China 22, no. 2 (2001): 124-55.

Bai explores Chinese educator and thinker Liang Qichao’s proposed reforms of children’s education before the 1989 Reform, sees children closely linked to the fate of China as a nation-state. Bai examines Liang’s critiques of traditional education and his endeavours to incorporate Western and Japanese learning into the country’s new curriculum, which he designed and prmulgated.

Bai, Limin. "Children as the Youthful Hope of an Old Empire: Race, Nationalism, and Elementary Education in China, 1895–1915." Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 2 (2008): 210-31.

This article provides an historical inquiry into Liang Qichao’s writing that depicts children as the symbol of new China at the turn of the twentith century. Bai highlights Liang’s thinking that “education is a key to the survival of China”, that led to the new textbooks.

Pepper, Suzanne. "Chinese Education after Mao: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back and Begin Again?". The China Quarterly, no. 81 (1980): 1-65.

This paper foregrounds two contradictory strategies under the CCP: the “egalitarian” and the “hierarchical”. Pepper argues that both must be held in balance if one is to understand the challenges and precepts in Chinese education policy both during and post the Maoist era.

Pepper, Suzanne. "Education and Revolution: The" Chinese Model" Revised." Asian Survey 18, no. 9 (1978): 847-90.

In this article, the author highlights problems that the political leaders and educators confronted after the CCP came to power in 1949: mass illiteracy, the need for a differentiated mass education system, the imbalance between “the output of the education system and the needs of the economy” (849), and generational misunderstandings. As with all Pepper’s work, this is a core article for educational history and social studies.

Kwong, Julia. "Educating Migrant Children: Negotiations between the State and Civil Society." China Quarterly (2004): 1073-88.

In this article, which looks at the migrant children’s schools in Beijing in the 1990s, Kwong suggests that said schools have become key sites that crystallize the fraught

tension and interaction between the state and the increasing strength of civil society in China.

Kwong, Julia. "Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing." Journal of Youth Studies 14, no. 8 (2011): 871-83.

This article closely examines the marginality of school-age migrant children enrolled in Beijing’s schools in today’s China by investigating the marginality of migrant communities, their social exclusion in and from the public school system, and the continuously marginalised identity of migrants that is often constructed by symbolic means.

Kipnis, Andrew B. "Articulating School Countercultures." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2001): 472-92.

This anthropological study explores school counterculture in many nations, especially in East Asia. Kipnis first looks at well-articulated school counterculture and then explores the various socio-cultural forces and circumstances that either impede or promote the articulation of sub- and countercultures. Finally, he lists four types of student resistance in a Chinese setting: disrespect for teachers, generalized criticism of the examination system, resistance involving students who ostracize their more academically oriented peers, and cheating in exams.

Kipnis, Andrew B. Governing Educational Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Drawing on the research mainly conducted in three schools in Zouping county, Shandong province between 2005 and 2006, with final updates made in 2007 and 2009, this book examines aspects of educational desire. Kipnis also casts light upon the tremendous consequences of educational desire, its influence on urbanisation, Chinese nationhood, gender and ethics relations, and Chinese modernity. All in all, a very important book.

ANTHROPOLOGYAnthropologists have led the way in considering childhood on its own account. Those collected here are again, a few samples of a much wider field. We have included works that showcase academics who have worked on childhood consistently rather than as a secondary subject and whose work covers both settled and migrant communities (Fong 2002, 2004; Fong and Kim, 2011; Naftali, 2009,2010; and Woronov, 2004, 2007, 2009) as well as including the edited collection by Jing Jun (2000) on little emperors food and social change. Nine chapters of this book deal in turn with: changing feeding patterns, the relationships between food consumption, peer pressure, parental control and school education, an ethnographical account of the consumption of ‘trendy’ food in a Muslim community, generational difference, the localized business practice of the KFC franchise, child care and the food consumption habits of children in China’s rural areas, the relationships between breastfeeding, the government health policy and transnational corporations’ marketing strategies, analysis of the Wahaha Group as a giant food and beverage producer based in Hong Zhou, and dietary change in – and attitudes towards – children in Hong Kong and Mainland China. In Woronov’s work – which should also be read in conjunction with Kwong (see Education above) she highlights certain forms of governmentality, such as the schools’ application of a self-rating grid as a common pedagogic tool, the promotion of depoliticized revolutionary models as embodied morality, and the

school curricula’s content aiming to develop children’s ability to “eat bitterness”, on the other, she points to consumption as a market-driven force that played an equally pivotal role in the renewed suzhi discourse in the reform era (a theme also explored by Kipnis, see Education, above). Taken together, these citations demonstrate the importance for current anthropology of linking comnsumerism, political contexts, social specificity and gender.

Jing Jun, ed. Feeding China's Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

The authors of this book examine how the emerging consumerist culture, together with the demographic change brought about by the state’s one-child policy, have fundamentally affected children’s food consumption in China.

Fong, Vanessa L. "China's One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters." American Anthropologist 104, no. 4 (2002): 1098-1109.

This anthropological study looks at singleton daughters in Dalian, a northern coastal city of China in the late 1990s. It optimistically suggests that urban singleton daughters, having been produced and empowered by China’s one-child policy, have the capacity to defy disadvantageous gender norms.

Fong, Vanessa L. "Filial Nationalism among Chinese Teenagers with Global Identities." American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 631-48.

In this article, Fong proposes the notion of “filial nationalism”, a phenomenon she observed among teenagers in Dalian during her ethnograpy of Dalian city. She notes that there is a contradiction between Dalian teenagers’ identification with a global imagined community and their perception of China’s inferiority in the capitalist world system. This contradition leads to nationalist sentiments characterised by filial devotion rather than a state-sponsored discourse of nationalism.

Fong, Vanessa L., and Sung won Kim. "Anthropological Perspectives on Chinese Children, Youth, and Education." In A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, edited by Bradley A. U. Levinson and Mica Pollock. 333-48. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011.

This chapter provides an overview of anthropological literature on Chinese children, youth and education in the Anglophone world. The authors suggest that scholarship on this subject since the birth planning policies of the late 1970s has been characterized by two bodies of anthropological literature: one emphasizing the historically distinctive characteristics of this generation, and the other focusing on how Chinese culture has shaped childrearing and child development in various geographical sites and in Chinese communities within and without mainland China.

Woronov, Terry E. "In the Eye of the Chicken: Hierarchy and marginality among Beijing's migrant schoolchildren" Ethnography 5, no. 3 (2004): 289-313.

This ethnographical research looks at Beijing’s migrant schoolchildren through the lens of the fieldwork conducted by the author from 1999 to 2001. It explores how hierachies are ongoingly produced through embodied spatial practices within Beijing. Migrant schoolchildren in Bright Day School, where the author conducted her ethography, are metonymically linked to the migrant group as unruly, low “quality” (suzhi), and ideologically backward “nomadic subjects” located in the city space.

Woronov, Terry E. "Performing the Nation: China’s Children as Little Red Pioneers." Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 647-72.

This anthropological research investigates a certain type of children, i.e., Beijing’s Little Red Pioneers (aged between 7 and 10) in Beijing in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity”, this article argues that the repetitive daily activities and practices structured by the Pioneer, a Chinese Communist Party sponsored organization, play a renewed yet important role in producing and shaping children as nationalistic subjects.

Woronov, Terry E. "Governing China’s Children: Governmentality and ‘Education for Quality’." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 567-89.

This article, which combines cultural theories and an ethnograpy, views the fraught notion and practice of suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality) as an “historical strategy of biopolitics” that was closely related to children in Beijing at the turn of the century.

Woronov, Terry E. "Learning to Serve: Urban Youth, Vocational Schools and New Class Formations in China." China Journal 66 (2011): 77-99.

Based on a year of ethnigraphic research (2007-2008), this article examines the lives and experiences of young people enrolled in two vocational schools in Nanjing through the prism of contemporary China’s new class formation. Woronov, predicating her argument on a Weberian framework of class, argues that vocational education produced a separate status group, memebers of which fall outside of the hegemonic notion of class mobility and middle class-moral citizenship.

Naftali, Orna. "Empowering the Child: Children's Rights, Citizenship and the State in Contemporary China." China Journal 61 (2009): 79-103.

Naftali examines the rise of a new discourse of children and their rights in contemporary China. The author suggests that this discourse relates to, but cannot be reduced to, the global “neoliberal” logic of governing children. Child rights discourse encapsulates the conceptualisations of the child as both citizen and subject of 21st century urban China.

Naftali, Orna. "Recovering Childhood: Play, Pedagogy, and the Rise of Psychological Knowledge in Contemporary Urban China." Modern China 36, no. 6 (2010): 589-616.

This article explores the emergence of the psychological discourse of childhood and the ways in which authority figures – teachers and parents – engage with this developmental discourse. Naftali argues that the newly-emerged psychological discourse reveals the shifting governmentality of school and family life and the current conceptualization of child as both citizen and subject in postsocialist urban China.

POLITICS AND PSYCHOLOGYThe social positioning of youth and childhood is almost always attached to a parallel of imbricated discourse of ethics and moral values. We have seen this in the sections on anthropology and education, and the theme continues in works of psychology and political memoir (Wang, 2001) and historical record (Huang 1937; Kwong, 1994; Zhou and Hou, 1999). The works cited below approach the notion of moral development and the child in a number of ways. Some use a particularly strict form of

psychological moralism (Chen and Zhu, 2007; Gao, 2008; Gao, 2010), whilst others are more intuitive and critical of the moralism in much Chinese social psychology. The link between politics, sociality, ideology and psychology is relevant to all of the arguments below, and is exemplified by Rosen’s scholarship (2009 is just one example of his oeuvre). Wang’s memoir piece is included and of course there are many memoirs which include accouts of young lives during the late 1960s (the Cultural Revolution period). These are of varying quality and are often strongly influenced by mainstream American publishers’ requirements for commercial success – so we include this feminist academic piece to represent a wider genre. Wang acknowledges that the gender-neutral subject position of Maoist qingnian (youth) had significant revolutionary implications rather than seeing them as mere statist manipulation or domination. “[A] youthful dream of a society of equality and justice” that persisted after the demise of the Maoist revolution (33).

Gao, Minghui. The Ethical Discourse of Chinese Children : A Narrative Approach to the Social and Moral Intricacy of Lying About Good Deeds. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

Gao’s study shows that both institutional and non-institutional efforts influences Chinese children’s decisions to lie about good deeds. Their ethical discourse, which is structured by “an authority-vs.-peers discrepancy”, entails four styles: authoritative, rule-governed, social consequential, and expressive (137-141). The study claims that lying about good deeds may be seen as a self-protection strategy, given that children’s ethical discourse frequently entails a strong sense of social distrust.

Kwong, Julia. "Ideological Crisis among China's Youths: Values and Official Ideology." British Journal of Sociology 45, no. 2 (1994): 247-64.

This article explores the change in the major beliefs of young Chinese in the 1980s from a sociological perspective. Kwong, foregrounding the tension between the official ideology and cultural realities, and examines several key issues appertaining to the youth culture of this period, including individualism, personal aspirations, growing alienation, immediate gratification, individual qualities, adimiration for everything foreign, and political attitudes.

Wang, Zheng. "Call Me Qingnian but Not Funu: A Maoist Youth in Retrospect." Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 9-84.

This is a self-reflexive, retrospective account of the author’s lived experience in the 1950s and 1960s as a female youth during the Maoist regime. One of her starting questions is: “Why do I recall these early memories with fondness, when the same experiences prove how thoroughly ‘brainwashed’ I was by Communist propaganda, to use the American mainstream language?” (16). Wang confesses that she is “stuck with the identity of ‘agent of social change’ endowed by the Maoist state”, which, allows her to carry on her own revolutionary agenda of feminism.

Rosen, Stanley. "Contemporary Chinese Youth and the State." The Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 02 (2009): 359.

This article examines the relationship between the post-80s generation and the Chinese state. It is just one of a number of works by Rosen which are worth reading on Chinese youth, as he has a keen grasp of political discourse as well as a developed and longstanding focus on youth studies.

Zhou, Xueguang, and Liren Hou. "Children of the Cultural Revolution: The State and the Life Course in the People's Republic of China." American Sociological Review 64, no. 1 (1999): 12-36.

This sociological study explores how the Maoist sent-down policy, that forced 17 million urban youth to migrate to China’s rural areas, affected, albeit not necessarily negatively, the life course of a generation of the country’s urban youth.

Huang Yi 黄翼. Ertong Huihua zhi xinli (儿童绘画之心理) (The Psychology of Children’s Drawings). Changsha: shangwu yinshu guan,1937.长沙: 商务印书馆, 1937.

The author, psychologist Huang Yi, analyses a series of drawings he collected from Chinese children through a psychological perspective. The article is particularly interesting if read in conjunction with the work of contemporary childhood studies research, where participatory methods and action research are increasingly common.

Chen Mingde 陈铭德, and Zhu Qi 朱琦. Xingjiaoyu de kunhuo yu duice (性教育的困惑与对策). Tianjin: Tianjin jiaoyu chubanshe, 2007.

This educational study explores the problems appertaining to sex education in contemporary China. By analyzing sex education in the context of families, schools and society as a whole in contemporary China, this research attempts to provide some resolutions to the problems of youth and adolescent sex education.

Gao Zhong 高中建, ed. Dangdai qinghsaonian wenti yu duice yanjiu (当代青少年问题与对策研究). Beijing: Beijing bianyi chubanshe, 2008.

This book is representative of a genre in youth and adolescent studies that examines youth and adolescent problems (qingshaonian wenti) in contemporary China. While not pathologizing per se, it provides some countermeasures in that it closely examines the various problems experienced by adolescents and youth, addressing culture, values, morality, psychology, marriage and dating, crime, delinquency, the Internet, safety and development.

MEDIA USEThis section focusses on recent and contemporary uses of media by young people and children. The emphasis falls on new media – specifically the internet and mobile phones. Academic disciplines most represented are anthropology and psychology – both of which contribute to various formations of media and communications. Bu Wei (2002a, 2002b) has been a pioneer in the field. Her essays discuss the development of various Chinese children’s media, children’s media uses (media contact, exposure and preferences) and media need. The link to education and psychology is also presnet in the discipline as scholars investigate how children’s media uses influence children’s moral development, modernity, and academic performances. There is also a strand of media effects discourse focussing on the control and effects of the media content violence, the relationship between media and the socialization of children’s gender roles, the impact of new media technologies (Huang, 2008; Liu, 2008; Liu, 2011) , and the media policy and management vis-à-vis children. The use of media by disenfranchised younger people, such as teenage migrant workers, is essayed by

Wallis (2011), who notes the benefits and problems of distributed media and centralised surveillance technologies, especially when applied to the working poor.

Bu Wei 卜卫 Dazhong meijie dui ertong de yingxiang (大众媒介对儿童的影响). Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2002a.

Drawing on various empirical research methods including literature review, interview, case studies, content analysis and social investigation, in this book, Bu Wei systematically explores the ways in which mass media have significantly impacted on Chinese children’s lives.

Bu Wei 卜卫 Meijie yu ertong jiaoyu (媒介与儿童教育). Beijing: Xinshijie chubansh, 2002b.Please note that this is not an academic book, but rather an anthology of Bu Wei’s essays. We include it given her seniority in the field.This book looks at a wide spectrum of issues in relation to children and media, stressing children’s own voice, participation and rights, supervision in children’s media uses, reading, Internet and education, and gender and media.

Liu Fengshu. "Wired for Fun: Narratives by Members of China's E-Generation." Young 19, no. 1 (2011): 69-89.

This article focuses on how the Internet has shaped the E-generation’s (the urban only-child generation) lives and experiences in today’s China.

Huang Shaohua 黄少华. Wangluo kongjian de shehui xingwei: Qingshaonian wangluo xingwei yanjiu (网络空间的社会行为: 青少年网络行为研究). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2008.

This sociological study, which explores the Internet behavior of youth and adolescence in contemporary China, looks at the social behavior of these two groups within the context of emerging Internet space and the social disparities that characterize Internet usage, the changing logic of Internet behavior, subjectivity and identity.

Wallis, Cara, “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media and Society 13, no. 3, 2011: 471-485.Wallis has written widely on young girls and the liminality of migrant labour in southern China and in Beijing. Here, Wallis discusses the new distributed surveillance techniques made possible by mobile phone uptake. The article should spark discussions on the status of childhood in the world of work.

Liu Binglun 刘炳伦. Qingshaonian shangwang chengyin zhiliao duice (青少年上网成瘾治疗对策) Beijing: renmin junyi chubanshe, 2008.

This study provides countermeasures to Internet addiction and its consequences affecting youth and adolescents from a medical perspective

RURAL CHILDRENStudies of childhood include work that is specifically engaged with the conditions and life experiences of the rural child. Although far advanced from the situation of Runtu, nonetheless, rural children do not have the same access to opportunities and resources

enjoyed by the urban counterparts, and migration has long been a feature of their lives – a situation exacerbated by Reform (Yan, 2003; Chen 2008). The following publications are mostly concerned with the current phenomenon of children with migrant parents – that is, children whose parents have travelled to the cities to work, usually leaving the children behind with carers, grandparents or older siblings. As well as shouldering heavy housework and field-work labour burdens due to the absence of their parents, left-behind children also experience psychological pressure, emotional insecurity and personal development problems (Wang and Gao, 2010; Fan et al, 2010; Ye and Lu, 2011). The authors below call attention to the urbanization process that has been achieved at the cost of the rural migrants and their families, especially at the expense of the children left behind. Furthermore, the authors call for greater social awareness regarding these children. These books evince a mixture of research, social comment and activism, as the plight of these children moved to the forefront of the mainstream conscience (Liu et al, 2008). That said, the general condition of rural children is highlighted by these cases. As Biao (2007) notes, the situation of members of left-behind groups “is not much worse than that of those living with other family members in the same community” (180), with children no exception. Biao, who is critical of the institutional reason (hukou system) writes: “[M]any rural communities as a whole have been left behind [both] economically and socially” (187).

Yan Hairong. "Specialization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China." American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 578-96.

This anthropological study explores rural Chinese women’s migration to the cities before and after the Reform era. Yan argues that young women’s pursuit of a modern identity, that is closely links to the urban space, has been fundamentally shaped by the changed rural-urban relationship resulting from China’s postsocialist development.

Wang Yijie 王毅杰, and Gao Yan 高燕. Liudong ertong yu chengshi shehui ronghe (流动儿童与城市社会融合). Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanseh, 2010.

Drawing upon literature reviews, participation observation, interviews conducted and questionnaires distributed between 2006 and 2008, this sociological study investigates the social integration process involving migrant children. The authors delineate the various forces that impact upon the said integration process, including the general attitude of urban society towards migrant children, migrant children’s family situation and school environment, the discourse of chasheng (“lagging behind” students) pertinent to migrant children, sociality in cities, and social identification.

Chen Yangbin. Muslim Uyghur Students in a Chinese Boarding School: Social Recapitalization as a Response to Ethnic Integration. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

This book reminds the reader that there are several forms of migration within China. In addition to the commonly known phenomenon of adults and teenagers travelling to the east or to cities in general to find work and to return remittances, there is also te phenomenon of semi-forced migration for peoples whose integration is required by central government. This book begins to unpack the multiple issues that attach to such migrations.

Ye Jingzhong and Lu, Pan. "Differentiated Childhoods: Impacts of Rural Labor Migration on Left-Behind Children in China." Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 2 (2011): 355-77.

Drawing upon data from research undertaken in 10 rural communities in China that involved 400 children who live apart from their migrant parents, this article shows the degree to which their parents’ migration has negatively impacted upon the care-giving and nurturing of left-behind children.

Luo, Jiayou, Xichun Peng, Rong Zong, Kuanbao Yao, Rushan Hu, Qiyun Du, Junqun Fang, and Mingyuan Zhu. "The Status of Care and Nutrition of 774 Left-Behind Children in Rural Areas in China." Public Health Reports 123, no. 3 (2008): 382-89.

Drawing upon questionnaires, anthropometry, dietary intake, laboratory examination, definition of Z-scores and statistical analyses, this health study focuses on the care and nutrition of 774 left-behind children of various ages; as well, it takes into account gender, birth weight and birth situation. The research shows that the level of nutritional intake is relatively low amongst populations of left-behind children; hence, there is a need to improve their nutrition, and to give better support to their special care-givers.

Fan, F., L. Su, M. K. Gill, and B. Birmaher. "Emotional and Behavioral Problems of Chinese Left-Behind Children: A Preliminary Study." Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 45, no. 6 (Jun 2010): 655-64.

Having analysed a Strength and Difficulty questionnaire completed by a sample of schoolchildren and a questionnaire completed by their caregivers, this psychological study shows that left-behind children are at high risk of developing emotional/behavioral problems. The probability is worse if they are left behind early in life with young caregivers, and/or with poorly educated nonrelatives of low socioeconomic status, and with little teacher support. This article calls for efforts to prevent such psychopathology, and to decrease the rates of left-behind children.

Biao Xiang. "How Far Are the Left-Behind Left Behind? A Preliminary Study in Rural China." Population, Space and Place 13, no. 3 (2007): 179-91.

This sociological study attempts to provide a systematic overview of China’s left-behind groups, including wives, children and the elderly. The article stresses the “fundamental institutional constraints” that underpin people’s decisions to either migrate or stay.

ANNUAL REPORTS

These are included in a separate section and longer explanations provided so that readers may find their own leads in areas of particular interest. All the citations below include multiple resources and disciplinary foci.

Fang Weiping 方卫平 and Liu Xuanwen 刘宣文, eds. 2007 Zhongguo ertong wenhua yanjiu niandu baogao (2007 中国儿童文化研究年度报告). Hangzhou: Zhejiang shaonian ertong chubanshe, 2008.

This 2007 annual report of Chinese children’s culture research, which may be considered a comprehensive tool book, comprises four sections: “document report”,

“academic frontier”, “hot issues focus” and “papers and theses index”. The first section assembles legal and important government reports and documents about children. The “academic frontier” section focuses upon academic research into children in various disciplines, including children’s studies, children’s philosophy, legal studies, sociology, education, psychology, literature, media, art, nutrition and health. The third section deals with five hotly debated social issues about children that occurred in 2007, including left-behind and migrant children, adolescents’ Internet addiction, juvenile delinquency, questions regarding the safety of children’s food and goods, and China’s animation industry. The last section provides an index of the research papers and Master’s and Doctoral dissertations related to Chinese children’s culture research undertaken in 2007.

Fang Weiping 方卫平 and Liu Xuanwen 刘宣文, eds. 2008 Zhongguo ertong wenhua yanjiu niandu baogao (2008 中国儿童文化研究年度报告). Hangzhou: Zhejiang shaonian ertong chubanshe, 2009.

This annual report, which documents the comprehensive research undertaken vis-à-vis Chinese children’s culture in the year 2008, is divided into four sections: “document report”, “academic frontier”, “hot issues focus” and “papers and theses index”. The first section concerns the law, and the important government bulletins, plans and regulations appertaining to children. Drawing upon research conducted by various disciplines, the focus of the second section is on children’s development and education, and children’s literature and art. The third section examines four of the 2008’s hotly debated issues: left-behind and migrant children (again); the children’s post-earthquake psychological crisis; media and children’s development; and, youth popular culture. The final section of the report provides an informative index listing research articles about children in the year 2008.

Fang Weiping 方卫平 and Liu Xuanwen 刘宣文, eds. 2009 Zhongguo ertong wenhua yanjiu niandu baogao (2009 中国儿童文化研究年度报告). Hangzhou: Zhejiang shaonian ertong chubanshe, 2010.

This report details the comprehensive researches undertaken into children’s culture in 2009. Divided into four parts, this 2009 annual report on Chinese children’s culture research emulates the structure of previous two years’ reports. The “hot issues focus”, described in this report, relates to research into gender education, children’s post-earthquake psychological crisis, and the problems inherent in the division between arts and sciences in high school (gaoxue) education.

Fang Weiping 方卫平, ed. 2010 Zhongguo ertong wenhua yanjiu niandu baogao (2010 中国儿童文化研究年度报告). Hangzhou: Zhejiang shaonian ertong chubanshe, 2011.

Adopting a structure somewhat different from the previous annual reports on Chinese children’s culture research, the 2010 report relegates documentation to the appendix The “hot issues” of 2010 includes the crisis regarding boys’ achievements in school, (the fact the girls outperforming them academically), adolescent Internet bullying, and school safety.

Lu Shizhen 陆士祯, Wu luping 吴鲁平, and Lu Deping 卢德平, eds. Zhongguo chengshi qingshaonian ruoshi qunti xianzhuang yu shehui baohu zhengce (中

国城市青少年弱势群体现状与社会保护政策). Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004.

This collection of research essays, most of which adopt a sociological perspective, closely examines the social politics of exclusion and integration in urban space in contemporary China. Focus is upon the vulnerable and/or disadvantaged social groups of urban youth and adolescents (chengshi qingshaonian); and, the various issues related to these groups, such as the evaluation and assessment of social policies, the legal system vis-a-vis special social protection, and suggestions regarding counter measures. The author of the book stresses the various categories that constitute these social groups, e.g, youth, adolescents and urban college students affected by poverty, orphans and disabled children fostered by urban families, migrant youth, unemployed college students, and low-income moving educated youth.