In:Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving stories
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 170–192
Chapter 8The affective construction of Chinese child citizenship in Little Friend, 1945–1949
Published online: 6 January 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.08xia
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.13.08xia
Abstract
After the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese society underwent a transition in imagining the nation and
its citizenry. The visual and textual narratives in the long-running children’s periodical Little Friend highlight these
changes as its post-war content features affective mechanisms to enlist children in a labor-oriented proletarian citizenship that
emphasizes collectivism. Drawing on affect’s stickiness and retrospective way of working (Ahmed), the chapter details Little
Friend’s affective crafting of a Chinese child citizenship through the periodical’s representations of laboring and disciplined
child bodies, as well as its geographical discourses. This crafting, the chapter argues, served as a means to encourage children’s
empathetic identification with the anticipated citizenship and the imagined nation during the late Republican period.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The history of Little Friend
- A visually formulated promise in the physical labor
- Geographical empathy
- Conclusion
Notes References
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