Margaret Mih Tillman's Raising China's Revolutionaries covers the establishment of child welfare ideas, practices, and institutions during the Republican era, many of which persisted in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Whereas many scholars of modern China have shown the competitive, survivalist motivation of Chinese modernization projects within an international context of social Darwinism and global imperialism, Tillman also seeks to demonstrate the cooperative nature of efforts to create a modern childhood in China. In particular, she focuses on two transnational, intermediary examples: the Columbia University–educated child psychologist Chen Heqin and the National Child Welfare Association (NCWA), a Protestant charitable organization with American origins.
Chen Heqin, a child psychology expert who studied with John Dewey, argued that Chinese childhood was a specific and unique childhood worthy of its own research. Chen viewed the use of foreign ideas and practices, including English, Christianity, and Western educational ideas, as compatible with creating a Chinese childhood because he defined Chinese as a racial rather than cultural or national category. However, during the 1950s after the establishment of the PRC, Chen was accused of acting as a comprador. Tillman argues that he fell victim to a newly politicized definition of the Chinese people during the PRC, and that his Republican-era research on childhood had indigenized Western ideas about childhood.
In looking at the NCWA's efforts to promote child welfare during the first half of the twentieth century, Tillman shows how the organization cooperated with the Nationalists and the Republic of China (ROC). With this support, the NCWA enlisted Western-educated Chinese as experts in its projects to invest in children's welfare through family education, increased biomedical interventions such as vaccines, and institutions to provide material aid, including clinics for poor children and preschools for the children of workers. Tillman argues that these efforts were part of the Nationalist government's larger engagement with “new models of international cooperation and national solidarity in the name of shared civic values” (p. 53).
The discussions of the effects of World War II and the civil war on the NCWA and child welfare efforts are particularly illuminating. Chapter 4 examines the effects of the war on the NCWA, the Nationalists, and the Communists. After the ROC fled to the interior, charitable organizations operated with greater independence. The NCWA relied more on small donors, which Tillman argues democratized philanthropy in China. The NCWA was also able to emphasize Christianity and use the organization to proselytize more explicitly and directly.
Given the importance attached to protecting children during wartime and the increasing “instrumentalization” of children by all parties involved, Tillman demonstrates that the Nationalists and Communists sometimes cooperated in child welfare efforts. She gives as an example the Border Region Children's Orphanage, which was run by Gao Gang and Lin Biao, with Song Meiling (Madame Chiang) and her sister Song Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) both serving as “honorary members of the board” (pp. 117–18). However, in chapter 5, Tillman shows how these brief instances of cooperation quickly disintegrated during the civil war, as the Nationalists and Communists created competing organizations dedicated to postwar child welfare. Tillman points out that the ROC's large-scale state-building projects often had humanitarian goals, but the struggling Republic was “so overburdened by these large projects” that it had to abandon providing even “basic services” (p. 157).
In contrast with previous scholarship that has characterized the Nationalist-run ROC as corrupt and ineffective, Tillman takes the government seriously in its attempts to reform childhood. While the Communists and others, including historians, have accused the Nationalists of corruption, exploitation, and disregard for vulnerable members of the Chinese population, Tillman argues that these accusations were often misinterpretations of why various projects had failed. She acknowledges other criticisms, such as the eugenicist origins of much of the child welfare projects of this era, but the book is primarily focused on recovering the efforts of Western-allied reformers and ROC state actors, including Kong Xiangxi and Song Meiling.
As is Tillman's explicit aim, Raising China's Revolutionaries concentrates on the ideas and institutions related to childhood in this period, not on the experiences of children themselves or the outcomes of these ventures. Indeed, there is some ambiguity over what a child and childhood mean in her analysis, although she seems to use the terms as the historical actors used them. Thus while the book focuses mostly on early childhood—the age range targeted by preschools and kindergartens—older children sometimes also figure in the category. Within the education journals and writings of child experts on which Tillman relies, however, there are tantalizing glimpses into the experiences of children and the conditions within child welfare institutions. Expanding on these glimpses would have given the reader a more solid sense of what a modern childhood entailed and how organizations and institutions implemented ideas about childhood and child welfare.
This is a book for scholars and students already familiar with the contours of modern Chinese history. Tillman writes for her peers, and she displays incredible command of the historiography on which she draws. Her rich and deft incorporation of insights from the wider field shows that research on childhood is intimately connected to all the other concerns within the field of Chinese history.
