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Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History book cover

1st Edition

Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History

Edited By Isabella Jackson, Yushu Geng Copyright 2026
274 Pages 27 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

274 Pages 27 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
At the cutting edge of the growing field of the history of childhood, this book shows how placing children at the centre of historical analysis enables the past to be viewed in new ways. Demonstrating that changes in the way Chinese children were viewed and cared for emerged in the context of an international shift towards child-centred education, the book places Chinese childhood in a global... Read more

1. Introduction: Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History
Yushu Geng and Isabella Jackson

Part 1: Chinese childhood in a global context

2. The Road to Adaptation: The Boy Scout Movement and the Making of Youth Culture in Shanghai, 1912–1919
Peter Kwok-Fai Law

3. Black Hair, Black Eyes: The Child as Universal Subject in Civil War China, 1946-1949
Jack Neubauer

Part 2: Children in the family and the state

4. National Necessity or Privileged Commodity: Chinese Childcare Centres of the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937
Ka Lo Yau

5. Advertising Girlhood and Womanhood in Republican Shanghai: Between Family Prosperity and the Fate of the Nation
Yushu Geng

6. Cultivating of the ‘Whole Child’ among Chinese Christian Elite Girls: Nationalist and Communist Visions of Childhood
Margaret Mih Tillman

Part 3: Education and scientific authority

7. Reconceptualising Nüxue (Female Learning and Education): Xu Jiaxing’s Self-Cultivation Textbook for Girls (1906)
Limin Bai

8. Science in the Toy Box: Leisure and the Domestication of Technology in the Republican and Mao Eras
Valentina Boretti

Part 4: Children’s Voices

9. ‘My Father Sold me as a Maid’: When binü (婢女, ‘maidservants’ or ‘slave-girls’) spoke up in Republican China
Isabella Jackson

10. ‘At the Centre of a Tornado’: Missionary schoolgirls’ experiences of the Second Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai
Jennifer Bond

11. Children at the Margins: Rethinking anthropological perspectives about mid-twentieth century Chinese childhoods
Jing Xu

Biography

Isabella Jackson is Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin, where she was the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council Laureate Award ‘CHINACHILD: “Slave-Girls” and the Discovery of Female Childhood in Twentieth-Century China’ (2018-2024).

Yushu Geng is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, having previously been a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU Shanghai and an Irish Research Council research fellow on the CHINACHILD project.

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