UC Santa Cruz

“Inventing the Socialist Child” illustrates the thinking, institution-building, and daily practices by which childhood was reformulated and shaped in the context of socialist nation-building in urban China from 1949 to 1966. This project draws on archival and published documents, mostly from the cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, to demonstrate that, despite numerous and overlapping political campaigns, unstable foreign relations, and rapid policy changes during the decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, one area in which the state had a remarkably consistent policy was its efforts to foster a specific kind of socialist childhood. Although the officials of the Maoist state believed children should be reared by their families, their goal of producing cooperative, revolutionary citizens required efforts to constrain non-state “bad influences.” State officials’ wariness about the values imparted by family and community members was compounded by the mobilization of women for production, which took many adult women out of the home and had the potential to leave children unsupervised for long periods. The desire to supplement or supplant inadequate supervision of children caused the state to intrude in family structure and child-rearing in new and important ways. “Inventing the Socialist Child” helps scholars understand how the shift to socialism brought major changes to every area of life, including gender roles, family life and child rearing, and the everyday experience of childhood during a time of revolutionary change. “Inventing the Socialist Child” enters broader conversations about childrearing and family-state relations in the postwar era around the world, and demonstrates that China used children in a tool of its postwar stabilization and nation-building efforts, deploying images of children in domestic and international propaganda, as well as actual children as agents of state-directed change—both ideological and practical—within families and society.