About Little Friend

Little Friend

Little Friend (Chinese: 小朋友; pinyin: Xiǎo Péngyǒu) is a children's magazine published in Shanghai, China. Launched in 1922, it was produced for children in the first and second years of primary school, and it holds a singular place in Chinese publishing history. The King's College London research project The Mao Era in Objects, drawing on the British Museum's Mary Ginsberg, calls it China's longest-running children's magazine, noting that it was published continually for some ninety years, apart from two long suspensions — during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945 and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library, which holds early volumes of the magazine, likewise describes Little Friend as arguably the longest-running children's magazine in China, one that remained active despite those two major interruptions. Few Chinese periodicals of any kind, and no other children's title, can match that span from the republican era of the 1920s through the People's Republic and into the twenty-first century.

The magazine's longevity is only part of its significance. Little Friend was founded at the moment when modern Chinese children's publishing was being invented, and after 1949 it became one of the two most widely distributed children's magazines in the country, alongside Children's Epoch. Its history therefore traces, in miniature, the whole arc of twentieth-century China: a commercial Shanghai magazine of the 1920s, a wartime casualty, a transformed publication of the new People's Republic, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and a survivor that reappeared when that upheaval ended.

Founding in Shanghai in 1922

Little Friend was launched in Shanghai in 1922 by Li Jinhui (1891–1967), who edited the magazine in Shanghai through much of the 1920s. It was published by the Zhonghua Book Company — Chunghwa Shuchü in the older spelling used in scholarly sources — which before 1949 was one of China's three largest private publishing houses. A study of child-centred publishing in modern China records that in 1922 the Commercial Press founded Children's World and the Zhonghua Book Company founded Little Friend, that the two titles were both hugely popular in their day, and that together they helped push Chinese children's publishing towards a mature system with stable editorial teams. Shanghai was the centre of that world: the same study counts more than fifty institutions publishing children's periodicals in China in the period and more than three hundred children's newspapers and magazines, radiating outwards from Shanghai to the surrounding provinces.

The timing mattered. Children's literature in China emerged as a distinct field in the early twentieth century, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the New Culture Movement and the spread of vernacular Chinese as a written language encouraged authors to write stories specifically for children. Western children's books were being translated, and major presses discovered a lucrative market in young readers. Little Friend, appearing in the same year as Children's World, stood at the head of that first wave — and unlike almost all of its contemporaries, it did not disappear when that first wave receded.

Li Jinhui, the founder better known for music

The magazine's founder is a remarkable figure in his own right. Li Jinhui is remembered in Chinese cultural history chiefly as the father of Chinese popular music, and he was also a pioneering writer of children's song and dance. Born in Xiangtan, Hunan province, he grew up with folk music and local opera, studied at a higher normal school in Changsha, and in 1916 took part in the music activities of Peking University, editing song collections of new popular music and collected folk songs. From 1921 he worked in Shanghai for the Zhonghua Book Company, editing children's magazines and children's books, and biographical accounts record that from 1920 to 1927 he was editor-in-chief of the Little Friend weekly. His children's operas and songs — works such as The Sparrow and the Child, The Grape Fairy and The Little Painter — circulated widely in China and overseas Chinese communities.

In 1927 Li founded a Chinese song and dance school and then a song and dance troupe, which toured China and, from 1928, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaya and Singapore; in 1931 the troupe was absorbed into the Lianhua film company. After 1949 he worked as a composer at the Shanghai animation film studio, and he died in Shanghai in 1967. That the founder of China's longest-running children's magazine was simultaneously the founding figure of Chinese popular music underlines how small and interconnected the pioneering generation of modern Chinese children's culture was: the songs children sang and the magazine they read came, in part, from the same man.

The republican-era magazine and the wartime suspension

Under the Republic, Little Friend was a commercial children's weekly from one of Shanghai's great private publishers, produced in a competitive market in which children's reading was a serious business. Its early volumes survive in research collections such as Princeton's Cotsen Children's Library, whose Chinese children's magazine holdings are anchored by early volumes of Children's World and Little Friend, both launched in Shanghai in 1922.

That first life was cut short by war. When the full-scale Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the social upheaval and shortages of production materials forced most Chinese children's publications to cease, and Little Friend was among them. Both the King's College London account and the Cotsen Children's Library date the magazine's first great suspension to the war years, 1937 to 1945. The magazine's story for those years is therefore the story of Chinese children's publishing as a whole: a flourishing, Shanghai-centred industry scattered by invasion. After victory in 1945 the industry briefly revived, before the renewed civil war again disrupted it — and then, in October 1949, the founding of the People's Republic changed everything about the magazine, as the King's College account puts it, completely.

Transformation after 1949

The People's Republic nationalised and centralised publishing during the 1950s, ensuring that officially approved messages were disseminated for mass mobilisation. Children's magazines were considered important instruments in that project, because in the early years of the People's Republic film, radio and television were not very accessible, especially in rural areas; print reached children whom no other medium could. The King's College London account stresses that children's magazines were important tools of socialisation and official campaigns at every educational level, and that they were interactive publications — full of puzzles and quizzes to solve, models to make or draw, songs to sing and stories to retell in the child's own experience.

Little Friend's place in the new system was defined by its readership: it was the magazine for the youngest schoolchildren, those in the first and second years of primary school. Within a publishing landscape increasingly organised by grade level, that made it the entry point to organised children's reading in China — the first magazine a Chinese schoolchild of the Mao era was likely to encounter.

Consolidation in the 1950s and the growth of its print run

The 1950s brought consolidation and specialisation. Regional and national children's titles were gathered into a more centralised structure, and in 1956 a Children's Publishing House was established in Beijing under the direct control of the Communist Youth League. In that consolidated landscape, the King's College account identifies the two most widely distributed children's magazines in China as the twice-monthly Little Friend and Children's Epoch, the latter aimed at third- and fourth-year primary pupils — the natural next step up for a Little Friend reader.

The growth of Little Friend's print run, as recorded in the same account, shows how completely the new system embraced it. Only about 8,000 copies were printed in the early 1950s; by 1956 the figure had risen to about 150,000; and by the mid-1960s more than 500,000 copies were being printed. A magazine that had begun as one Shanghai weekly among hundreds had become, in circulation terms, one of the largest children's publications in the country.

Campaigns, content and the child reader of the Mao era

Because Little Friend appeared frequently, it could be used to promote special holidays, current issues and official campaigns to its young readers. The King's College London project illustrates this with a 1960 issue celebrating International Children's Day, 1 June 1960, showing children from all continents — an image of international solidarity pitched at six- and seven-year-olds. Content for the youngest readers necessarily worked through pictures, songs, simple stories and activities, and the magazine's interactive character — things to solve, make, draw, sing and retell — was a defining feature of the genre it helped to establish.

Historians value the magazine precisely because of this. A publication aimed at the very youngest readers shows what each era of modern Chinese history wanted its children to absorb first, and Little Friend's covers and contents are used by researchers, including the British Museum and King's College London, as primary evidence for how childhood was imagined and organised in Mao-era China.

Suspension in the Cultural Revolution and revival

The magazine's second great interruption came in 1966. Little Friend, Children's Epoch and most other Chinese periodicals suspended publication from 1966, at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, and the suspension lasted through the Cultural Revolution years, conventionally dated 1966 to 1976. For a magazine founded in 1922, this was the second time that national upheaval had silenced it; the pattern of its history — publication in settled times, silence in catastrophe — repeated itself almost exactly thirty years after the wartime suspension began.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, the suspended children's magazines reappeared, and Little Friend resumed its place as the magazine for the youngest primary-school readers. Its survival was not a foregone conclusion: many pre-1949 titles never returned, and the Cotsen Children's Library's judgement that Little Friend remained active to the present day, despite its two suspensions, is what underpins its claim to be China's longest-running children's magazine. A title that had already lived through the Republic, the war and the first decades of the People's Republic proved able to live through the reform era as well.

Place among Chinese children's magazines

Little Friend's closest companion in the historical record is Children's Epoch. The two are consistently named together: the grade-level system put Little Friend in the hands of first- and second-year pupils and Children's Epoch in the hands of third- and fourth-year pupils, and together they were the most widely distributed children's magazines of the Mao era. Its other great contemporary was Children's World, the Commercial Press title founded in the same year, 1922, which did not survive in the same way. Comparative scholarship on Chinese children's magazines in Southeast Asia also treats Little Friend, published from 1922 onwards, as one of the foundational mainland titles against which later magazines elsewhere in the Chinese-speaking world are measured.

The magazine also stands as evidence for the quality of that founding moment. A scholarly history of children's publishing in the period quotes the Japanese picture-book figure Tadashi Matsui's judgement that Chinese children's book publishing had already reached a considerable international standard in the 1920s — the decade in which Little Friend and Children's World appeared and flourished.

Legacy

Little Friend's legacy is, above all, duration with identity. Founded in Shanghai in 1922 by a musician who believed children deserved material made expressly for them, published by one of China's great private houses, suspended by war, remade after 1949 as the twice-monthly magazine of China's youngest schoolchildren, grown from 8,000 copies to more than half a million, silenced again for a decade and then revived, it outlasted every publishing system that produced it. For historians of Chinese childhood, of Chinese publishing and of the Mao era, its long run of issues is an archive of how China taught its youngest citizens to read — and of what successive Chinas wanted those citizens to become.