Constructing the “Scientific” Child in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Children’s Periodicals

While the influence of classic Confucian texts such as The Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety, One Hundred Surnames, Thousand-Character Text, and Three-Character Classic on Chinese childhoods has been well documented (Bai; Hsiung; Hu), non-canonical texts published for Chinese children in the nineteenth century, particularly children’s periodicals, have received less critical attention. This chapter analyses the construction of Chinese childhood in Xiaohai Yuebao (The Child’s Paper, 1875–1915) and Mengxue Bao (The Children’s Educator, c. 1897–1906). The former was a monthly produced by Protestant missionaries that included not only Bible stories but also articles on natural history, astronomy, and physiology. The latter was the first Chinese-run children’s magazine started by Chinese reformers which also published columns on nineteenth-century science. This chapter considers how the two periodicals constructed the image of the “scientific” child. The scientific children in these magazines provide a stark contrast to figures such as Wang Xiang from the canonical Yuan dynasty (1260–1368) text The Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety that lacked scientific approaches in their attempts to demonstrate filial piety, the moral standard governing parent–child relationships (Bai, Shaping). Instead of trying to find or fashion a tool to cut a hole in a frozen river, Wang Xiang risks hypothermia by taking off his clothes and using his body temperature to melt the ice to fish for carp, because his stepmother expressed a craving for it. Produced in an environment fraught with anxieties about China’s future, the two magazines mobilised the figure of the child to argue for the need to empower the younger generation by equipping them with scientific knowledge.