Andrew Jones's fascinating study dissects the “elephant in the exhibition hall of modern Chinese cultural production” (p. 6), that is, the discourse of development stemming from the evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel. Developmentalist thought was translated and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals from the late nineteenth century onwards, and it thoroughly suffused print and media cultures in China by the 1930s. Developmentalism eventually crystallized into the most “powerful and pervasive ideology” in China (p. 4), rationalizing and legitimizing wholesale socioeconomic interventions—epitomized in Deng Xiaoping's 1992 slogan, “Development is the only hard imperative.”
As Jones shows, this Chinese development discourse was not just about economic growth or improvement of social welfare. Rather it was a “way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change” (p. 3). It made sense of the “growth and progress of nations and national subjects in their relation to other nations and the natural world” (p. 6) within a global order where Western nations occupied the apex. The figure of the child was central in this understanding of development, which was mostly grasped “as a form of pedagogy through which the enlightened [were] entrusted with the elevation of the as-yet undeveloped” (p. 6). As the Chinese child emerged as “an object of sustained investment and intense anxiety” (p. 5), children's literature became a crucial element in the project of national salvation for cosmopolitan intellectuals like Lu Xun (1881–1936), whose writings form the centerpiece of this monograph. Jones argues that children's literature (along with utopian and science fiction), often regarded as an appendage to the Chinese canon, was in fact intensely engaged with the contradictions and dilemmas of colonial modernity. The central problem was that of agency: if development, according to the evolutionary narrative, is “inevitable,” why does it need to be kick-started? If natural selection is “random,” can it be influenced at all? And if acquired characteristics or learned behaviors cannot be inherited, what hope is there for the next generation?
The five chapters contain case studies on how these questions played out in a variety of media. Chapter 1 concentrates on Wu Jianren's New Story of the Stone (1905–08), an imaginative rewriting of The Dream of the Red Chamber. Jones reads this alongside Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as well as Lu Xun's parable of the “Iron House.” Wu's utopian text “attempts to dream a future outside the iron laws of historical necessity” (p. 33), but Jones shows that its formal and logical contradictions precisely point to the inability of escaping one's ideological imprisonment.
Chapter 2 turns to Lu Xun's “The Misanthrope” (1925), which Jones contrasts with education primers, children's books, and magazines for young adults. Alongside these, he introduces the debates between “tragic inevitability and developmental agency” (p. 65), and the ideas of Du Yaquan (1873–1933) and Zhou Jianren (1888–1984). Whereas children's literature suggests that the improvement of the species is possible through careful nurturing, Lu Xun espouses a bleak vision of inheritance, implying that “evil will implacably be passed down from generation to generation, regardless of any attempts to remake China's social and cultural environment, educate the young, and remake the future” (p. 90).
Chapter 3 couches the “discovery of childhood” in Republican China in terms of a wide-ranging analysis that includes children's drawings collected by psychologist Huang Yi (1903–55) and debates on fairy tales and folklore centered on the writings of Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967). Jones further argues that “the centrality of children in May Fourth nationalist discourse both underwrites and is underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children's market as a major source of revenue” (p. 112).
Chapter 4 exposes the “historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development in Republican China” (p. 129), focusing particularly on Sun Yu's film Playthings (1933) as well as on eerie photomontages that suggest dolls were “worth” more than Chinese infants.
The final chapter revisits the encounter between New Culture intellectuals and the Russian anarchist Vasilii Eroshenko (1890–1952). Exploring the parallels between Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman” (1918) and Eroshenko's fairy tale “A Narrow Cage” (which Lu Xun rendered into Chinese), Jones argues that Lu Xun raises the two central problems of anticolonial agency. First, if liberation struggles are predicated on universal enlightenment values of the aggressors, what happens after China is liberated? Second, in attempting to construct a Chinese identity to bolster the anticolonial and nationalist movement, is one only trapping oneself in another iron cage?
With this, Jones brings his study to a thought-provoking but rather abrupt end. Given that his introduction gestures towards post-socialist economic reforms, one wonders whether he could have also discussed, even if briefly, the evolutionary tropes and narratives that have persisted in the cultural products of contemporary China. To be fair, Jones claims that his monograph is an “unsystematic introduction to the cultural history of the child in modern China” (p. 5) and not an “exhaustive or chronological history of evolutionary thought in China” (p. 8). The brilliant snapshots that Jones offers chart important pathways along which a global discourse of development circulated in China. His careful rereading of well-known as well as less familiar texts commands literary scholars' attention. His incisive analysis of the dissemination and “vernacularization” of natural history and evolutionary knowledge is invaluable to historians of science. His insightful discussions on pedagogy contribute to exciting research on the genealogies of childhood around the world.
