Children's literature in China emerged as a distinct genre in the early 20th century. Before this, children read educational works and reading primers alongside literature intended for adults. Primers were intended to both teach Chinese characters and instill values such as proper etiquette and filial piety. Picture books were introduced during the 15th century, and became popular as a way for children in middle-class families to learn basic literacy.
Children's periodicals emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, and western children's books began to be translated into Chinese. Following the fall of the Qing dynasty, the New Culture Movement, and the increased use of vernacular Chinese as a written language, more authors began to produce stories aimed at children. The children's literature market became lucrative to the emerging Chinese publishing industry, with various major presses publishing large volumes of children's books and periodicals in the 1920s and 1930s. Radical children's literature, which sought to teach children left-wing political ideals and class consciousness, became popular as the Chinese Communist Party grew during this time. Such literature gained further popularity following the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, albeit secondary to film. A surge in children's literature publishing took place in the 50s, before declining during the Cultural Revolution.Children's literature began again to grow in popularity during the liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s. This period saw some publications reincorporating Confucian values, while others authors have challenged patriarchal authority in their works and emphasized children's self-assertion.
Many children's books are adaptations of classic novels and folk tales, with simplified language so as to remain accessible to younger readers. Since the 2000s, works have increasingly explored issues children face in modern China and their effect on families. Academic study of children's literature and literary awards celebrating children's works are well-established in China.
History
Traditional children's readings
Although children were exposed to folklore and the oral tradition from an early age, no distinct genre of children's literature existed in China before the modern era. Reading materials for children in Imperial China were generally primers meant to instill values such as filial piety. The Three Character Classic, Hundred Family Surnames, and Thousand Character Classic were used to teach a vocabulary of around 2000 characters. Moral primers, focused on etiquette and Confucian virtues, included The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars and adaptations of the Book of Rites. However, as childhood was not understood as a finite period of time, reading of these materials continued into adulthood. Beyond educational works, children often read literature intended for adults.
The (), published in 1436, was the first children's picture book in China. Picture books gained popularity as a way to introduce young children to reading. Children from middle-class families, not needing the formal training required for the imperial examinations, may have learned only from illustrated primers in order to gain basic literacy. At around six or seven, boys began to study the Four Books and Five Classics. Archaic and difficult to understand for children, they were often memorized before their meanings were fully understood. Educational materials for girls were mainly conduct guides focused around preparing them for marriage, such as the Women's Precepts and the Classic for Girls. These works heavily emphasized women's submission to their husbands along Confucian ideals.
Early translations Foreign works of children's literature began to be translated into Chinese in the late Qing dynasty, with early publications including the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the books of Lewis Carroll, and J.M. Barrie's novel Peter Pan. Around 120 translated children's works were published in China between 1898 and 1919. Lin Shu, a prolific translator of Western literature (despite lacking fluency in any fluent language), produced a large number of translated children's works, including the first Chinese translation of Aesop's Fables in 1902. Sun Yuxiu translated 48 Western children's stories in his Tong Hua series, a compilation of adapted classical Chinese and western tales. Prior to the New Culture Movement, works were often translated into Classical Chinese instead of Standard Chinese, rendering them inaccessible to many children. These translations were generally published in Shanghai, variously included within magazines and books.
The initial wave of translations were followed by localized adaptations, with Shen Congwen and Chen Bochui continuing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Lao She publishing a 1940 book derived from Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). Liang Qichao and Lu Xun both translated works by Jules Verne for young Chinese readers, collectively highlighting the importance of science in modernization.
Emergence of children's literature Children's books emerged as a distinct domestic genre in the 1920s. Previously, amidst the turbulence of the late Qing dynasty, few children had had the luxury of reading, and the use of Classical Chinese further impeded them. Following the May 4th Movement, several writers began to prepare stories for children. Challenging the long-established system of Confucian beliefs, these authors were facilitated by the Republic of China government's policy of using vernacular Chinese as a language of instruction, which had been implemented in the 1910s. Accompanying this writing of children's literature were changing mores that recognized the agency of children, the idea of using age as a measure of development, and the implementation of student-centered learning.
Early proponents of children's literature in China included the prominent new culture novelist Lu Xun. Although Lu did not write for children, he frequently advocated for it, and translated a number of western children's books into Chinese. In 1919, Lu advocated in the literary magazine New Youth for writers to create a distinct children's literature. He was joined in this call the following year by his brother Zhou Zuoren. The two wrote that there existed a sharp divide between adults and the persecuted children, for whom adults needed to make a better future.
In 1923, Ye Shengtao published The Scarecrow, a compilation of fairy tales. Some scholars, including Lu, described The Scarecrow as the first major work of Chinese children's literature; others argued that Ye had co-opted the fairy-tale format as a form of critique against Chinese society more broadly, instead attributing the title of first children's book to Bing Xin's Letters to Young Readers, a collection of letters penned between 1923 and 1926 while she was studying in the United States. Letters to Young Readers became one of the most popular children's works in China during the 1920s; initially published as a newspaper supplement, it was republished as a book in 1926, and saw twenty-one different editions and republications over the following decade.
Magazines for children emerged in the early 1900s, including Educational Pictures for Children (1908–1925) and Fairy Tales (1909–1932). Children's World (published by the Commercial Press) and Little Friend (published by the Zhonghua Book Company) became the most prominent of these children's journals, each seeing biweekly circulations of over 20,000 copies. The Chinese publishing industry became highly dependent on the lucrative children's literature market. Publishers such as the Beixin Book Company, Kaiming Press, and all published large volumes of children's books. Beixin and Xiandai launched their own children's magazines — Little Student and Modern Child respectively — in an attempt to compete with periodicals such as Children's World. Shanghai, the center of the Chinese literary community during the Republican era, also became the center of children's literature and publishing.
Debates over purpose During the Republican period (1912–1949), theorists of the emerging children's literature argued what role children's literature had should have and on what themes the works should focus. Some theorists argued that the literature should focus on supplying happiness and curiosity to children, writing that children were unable to understand the sadness and emotional pain of the adult world. However, many early books (including The Scarecrow) were focused on themes of grief and empathy.
Zhou's 1920 essay "A Children's Literature", initially delivered as a lecture to elementary school educators, provided a systematic theory of childhood and children's literature, identifying five distinct stages of childhood development. He argued that children's literature should avoid both moral didactics and politics, instead encouraging fairy tales. Despite advocacy from figures such as Zhou, children's literature became highly politicized by the 1930s. The Commercial Press editor Bi Yun, published an attack on children's fables and fairy tales in the Eastern Miscellany in 1935, writing that children needed "content that exposes the ugliness and cruelty of the beautiful kingdoms and handsome princes in the fairy tales".
In 1931, the Hunan governor He Jian wrote to the Ministry of Education, urging them to ban fables from schools, prompting widespread debate on the format. Proponents of the stories described narratives including anthropomorphized animals as harmless encouragement to children's imaginations, while opponents argued that such narratives impaired children's ability to grasp reality. Although popular opinion largely supported the stories, they were banned from schools in 1932.
Wartime Radical children's literature emerged in China soon after the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, although this was a minor current in comparison to other forms during the period. Little Children's Weekly, a communist-affiliated children's magazine, was briefly published from 1926 to 1927, before it was pushed underground by the Kuomintang repression of the Communists during the Chinese Civil War. The genre declined during this period of repression, with authors often writing under pen names and avoiding political content in their stories in favor of fairy tales and fables. This situation began to reverse in 1936, particularly after the formation of the Second United Front at the end of the year. Zhang Tianyi's 1936 Big Lin and Little Lin, one of the most famed Chinese children's books of the 1930s, draws heavily from communist ideals, portraying the struggle between an elite ogre versus Little Lin, a worker.
Through the later parts of the decade, leftist children's magazines touched on international affairs as well as domestic concerns regarding the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Empire of Japan's imperial ambitions. The writer Mao Dun translated numerous works of western children's literature into Chinese. Further contributions to children's literature came from a range of prominent poets and novelists, including Ba Jin, Chen Bochui, and Guo Moruo. During the 1940s, Yan Wenjing and Zhang Tianyi emerged as the preeminent children's authors, although both also wrote for adults. Unlike earlier authors such as Ye and Bing, who tended towards more somber works, Yan and Zhang wrote hopeful, optimistic books which greatly appealed to children. Most of the children's literature in this era was intended for readers over the age of eleven.