Translation, Hybridization, and Modernization: John Dewey and Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth Century China

This essay examines how John Dewey’s child-centered educational philosophy was adopted and adapted in the early twentieth century in China to create a Chinese children’s literature. Chinese intellectuals applied Dewey’s educational philosophy, which values children’s interests and needs, to formulate a new concept of modern childhood that influenced emerging Chinese children’s literature. Underlying the apparently faithful borrowing of Dewey’s theory, though, is a fundamental contradiction between Dewey and his Chinese counterparts in terms of the nature of children. While Dewey was rejecting the notion that human beings possess innate characteristics, Chinese intellectuals were attempting to do the opposite, namely they were endeavoring to make “children” an essentialist category. By emphasizing this intersection of both foreign and indigenous influences in modern Chinese children’s literature, this essay also suggests that Chinese children’s literature is a hybrid product.