Raising China's revolutionaries : modernizing childhood for cosmopolitan nationalists and liberated comrades, 1920s-1950s /
Margaret Mih Tillman.
- New York : Columbia University Press, (c)2018.
- 1 online resource (xx, 339 pages).
- Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Child study in Chinese kindergartens : Chen Heqin's approach to family education -- Cherishing children : The National Child Welfare Association, 1928-1936 -- The calculus of child welfare : democratizing fundraising for Shanghai, 1937-1942 -- Wartime paternalisms : the cross-pollination of ideas in Yan-an and Chongqing -- Contested service : building a national social welfare program in the Civil War, 1945-1949 -- The re-education of child experts : Chen Heqin as a model of self-criticism, 1949-1953 -- Women's mobilization and childcare for the masses : new visions for collective childcare in the 1950s.
"Focuses on how childhood was reconstructed in China, and how children were cared for in new ways, from the early Republican period through the first decade of the PRC. During this time, reformers tried to "modernize" childhood, using a scientific rationale to justify increased intervention in family life, and leverage it as a fulcrum for social and political change in the country. The Chinese state eventually usurped the authority of these reformers and increased government involvement in child welfare and family life. While some opposed the state using childhood as a tool for economic modernization and political control, child advocates saw China's national salvation project as consistent with their efforts to safeguard children's "happiness." The book therefore shows that this "sentimentalization" of childhood could serve multiple purposes: academic scholarship, economic modernization, and political diplomacy"--