Taking Play Seriously: Children's Education and Nation-building in Modern China, 1897-1937

Abstract

China’s experience of foreign encroachment in the second half of the nineteenth century was what John Fitzgerald calls a wave of awakening among the intelligentsia. It was in this context that educational reform became imperative to save the nation. In the making of China’s modern education, Protestant influences acted as an early force, later competing with the Japanese model after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, and then combining with the Deweyan current in the 1920s. Far from being passive recipients, Chinese reformers and educators played an active role in filtering the international influences in response to the evolving nationalist sentiments and the global trend towards child welfare. This study focuses on the voices of state actors as well as progressive educators to examine the Chinese appropriation of imported ideas of modern childhood from the Self-strengthening Movement of the late Qing to the pre-war period of Republican China. Foreign intrusions and influences revolutionised the parameters of the ideal Chinese childhood. On the one hand, children were elevated to sentimental subjects to be protected, nurtured and cherished; on the other, they were burdened with the responsibility of saving the nation, as they were seen as the symbol of the future China. Whether to protect or to take advantage, the governments, educators and parents had to navigate the notions between sentimentalised and instrumentalised childhood. To what extent were young children politicised for nation-building? How was the advocacy for protection for children contested with the notion of using children as saviours of the nation? The emerging and often contested Chinese childhood was situated within the influx of international models and the rise of nationalism. This study methodologically adopts Chinese early childhood education as a lens through which to explore the coalescing dynamics between private and public, protected and instrumentalised, and Confucian virtues and scientific values in the transitional period between the reforms of the old empire and the nation-building of the new state.