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Images of Teachers in Contemporary Chinese Children’s Literature

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Abstract

This paper examines the changing presentation of teachers in the post-Mao era. The image of teachers was almost sacred in traditional Confucian society until Mao Zedong launched China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, when children were encouraged to use the pretext of class struggle to critique and even to attack their teachers. As such, restoring the high status of teachers in children’s literature became the first step in fighting against Maoist radicalism after his death in 1976. Since then, the internal logic of the development of literature has been shaped by the social movement of Openness and Reform and nurtured by a return of realist aesthetics. Meanwhile, Chinese society has also been changing rapidly, and so has the portrayal of teachers in stories for the young, which has become more diversified. Analysis of these changing images offers us an insight into China’s education system, as well as the use of Chinese children’s literature as a didactic tool for moral education.

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Notes

  1. Chinese secondary education (high school) consists of 3 years of junior high school (for ages 12–15) and 3 years of senior high school (for ages 15–18).

  2. The May Fourth Movement takes its name from a mass patriotic demonstration in Beijing on May 4th 1919 against the national government’s agreement with a term of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I that saw China cede Shandong Province, previously held by Germany, to Japan (Bi, 2018, p. 3). During this period, the pioneers of modern Chinese children’s literature tried to connect social realism to patriotism by exposing social problems in their books to educate the young.

  3. Translations from this text are by the present authors.

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Correspondence to Lijun Bi.

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Lijun Bi lectures at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Australia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. Her research publications are mainly on Chinese children’s literature.

Xiangshu Fang is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Australia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. His research interest covers political and moral indoctrination in China, Confucianism, and Chinese intellectual history.

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Bi, L., Fang, X. Images of Teachers in Contemporary Chinese Children’s Literature. Child Lit Educ 51, 179–191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9378-2

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