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Translation, Hybridization, and Modernization: John Dewey and Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth Century China

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Abstract

This essay examines how John Dewey’s child-centered educational philosophy was adopted and adapted in the early twentieth century in China to create a Chinese children’s literature. Chinese intellectuals applied Dewey’s educational philosophy, which values children’s interests and needs, to formulate a new concept of modern childhood that influenced emerging Chinese children’s literature. Underlying the apparently faithful borrowing of Dewey’s theory, though, is a fundamental contradiction between Dewey and his Chinese counterparts in terms of the nature of children. While Dewey was rejecting the notion that human beings possess innate characteristics, Chinese intellectuals were attempting to do the opposite, namely they were endeavoring to make “children” an essentialist category. By emphasizing this intersection of both foreign and indigenous influences in modern Chinese children’s literature, this essay also suggests that Chinese children’s literature is a hybrid product.

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Notes

  1. For the translated titles during the period, see Li (2010).

  2. In its narrow sense, the May Fourth Movement refers to the student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919. The demonstrations were against the Western Allies’ refusal to return to China the territory and rights of Shangdong, which were transferred from Germany to Japan, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. I use the May Fourth period in its broad sense, which refers to the New Culture Movement seen as the precedence and extension of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. I will discuss the New Culture Movement later.

  3. Mao Dun, for example, edited and created 27 fairy tales between 1918 and 1920, which were published in Fairy Tales (Jiang and Han, 1998, p.119). Zheng Zhenduo, editor of the first Chinese children’s magazine Children’s World, created the majority of the fairy tales published in the magazine (Jiang and Han, 1998, p. 122).

  4. Examples include Feng (1997), Sun (1995), and Farquhar (1999).

  5. According to Zhu Ziqiang, Zhou Zuoren had easy access to Dewey’s ideas. One condition is that Zhou was teaching at the Peking University while Dewey was visiting China upon the university’s invitation. Furthermore, Zhou might also be familiar with the articles introducing Dewey’s philosophy published in the journal New Youth, to which Zhou himself was a major contributor. Additionally, Zhou may have read William James’ works, which also influenced Dewey. See, Zhu, p. 163.

  6. Such examples are Guo (1990/1921), Zheng (1989/1922), and Yan (1928/1924).

  7. The evolutionary theory was first introduced into China at the turn of the nineteenth century by Yan Fu’s translation and exposition of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (Jones, 2011, p. 7). According to Fallace (2011), Dewey’s educational philosophy was also influenced by the evolutionary theory.

  8. Compared with his other works widely accepted during the period in China, Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, in which he explicated his social psychology, received little attention. In fact it was not translated into Chinese until 1953 by Zhou Wenhai. Zhou Wenhai translated only a little more than 20 pages of the book published in the journal Xin Sichao. The work’s unpopularity in China can also point to the fundamental conflict in the concept of human nature between Dewey and his Chinese counterparts during the period. For more publication information about Human Nature and Conduct, see Keenan, p. 239.

  9. For a detailed discussion of the reciprocal relationship between childhood and nationhood in modern China, especially in Maoist China, see Xu (2011).

  10. Andrew Jones’ Developmental Fairy Tales, particularly Chapter 3, provides a detailed discussion of the intersection of the discourse of the evolutionary theory and that of the child in Republican China.

  11. The Chinese word “tong” means “child(ren).” Ye Shengtao used “tong” as a pun, for “tong” is also the first word of “tong hua” (fairy tale) and thus also means “fairy tale.”

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  1. Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, 163 Chambers Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Xu Xu

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Correspondence to Xu Xu.

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X. Xu is a Doctoral Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University—University Park, where she studies children’s literature.

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Xu, X. Translation, Hybridization, and Modernization: John Dewey and Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth Century China. Child Lit Educ 44, 222–237 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9192-1

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