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In this article Tang Rui identifies two tendencies in writing for children in China in recent years: one school of thought, led by Cao Wenxuan, tries to develop young people's spiritual lives and aesthetic sensibilities; the other is more market-driven and responds to the demands of young readers for entertainment
At the end of the 19th century, Western literature in translation - including the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen - came into China, and undoubtedly they deeply influenced modern Chinese children's literature. Chinese students of the history of children's literature identify the short fairy tale 'The little white boat' by Ye Shengtao (1921) as the first piece of children's literature in modern Chinese.
Four periods in the 20th century
In the 20th century, there were four periods of Chinese children's literature. The first of these, 1921-49, was a time of turbulence in China, when the subjects of mercy and virtue gave way to those of conflict and revolution. In the second period, 1949-65, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, more writers for children emerged and most of their works showed youngsters' bright and prosperous life at school and at home and described them growing up and overcoming their children's weakness.
The third period was the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, a time when there was almost no children's literature. From 1977 until the 1990s, the passion of Chinese writers, which had been suppressed for ten years, came bursting out and children's literature began to flourish. The generation of younger writers who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and who had been forced by the political system to do very hard work on leaving school, now became the leading children's writers, and they had a very different valuation of life and literary conception from the pre-Cultural Revolution generation.
Debate raged at this time about whether children's literature should educate children or reflect human reality; whether the essence of children's literature is instructional or aesthetic; whether children's literature should go along with childish superficiality or pursue artistic profundity; whether children's literature should disclose the seamy side of life, and so on. In this period, the subjects of children's literature expanded into many fields of real life,...