About Children's Epoch

Children's Epoch

Children's Epoch (Chinese: 儿童时代; pinyin: Értóng Shídài) is a children's magazine published in Shanghai, China. It was founded on 1 April 1950 by the China Welfare Fund and Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, and it is recognised as the first comprehensive children's magazine founded in the People's Republic of China. Published at first as a semi-monthly, it was written for primary-school children — the King's College London research project The Mao Era in Objects, drawing on the British Museum, identifies it as the magazine for third- and fourth-year primary pupils, and pairs it with Little Friend as one of the two most widely distributed children's magazines of the Mao era. A China Welfare Institute history records that the magazine accompanied the growth of hundreds of millions of readers and warmed the childhood memories of several generations of the new China, becoming a calling card of Shanghai children's literature.

Children's Epoch was never merely a commercial venture. It was created as part of Soong Ching-ling's life's work for women and children, inside the welfare organisation she led, and its contributors included many of the most famous writers, artists and scientists in China. Its history — founding in 1950, leadership of its field by 1955, suspension during the Cultural Revolution, and revival in 1978 — is a history of the People's Republic told through one children's magazine.

Soong Ching-ling and the China Welfare Institute

The magazine's founder, Soong Ching-ling (1893–1981), was born in Shanghai and married Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China. During the war against Japan she established the China Defence League in Hong Kong in 1938 to drum up support for China's fight and to help children in war-affected areas; when the war ended, the league was renamed the China Welfare Fund. In August 1950 the fund was renamed the China Welfare Institute, the organisation Soong led for the rest of her life, working on maternal and child hygiene, healthcare and children's education.

China Today, in its account of her legacy, lists Children's Epoch among the institute's founding achievements, alongside the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, nurseries, kindergartens, a children's palace and a children's theatre — and alongside a second magazine, China Reconstructs, later renamed China Today. A history produced by the China Welfare Institute's own research group describes Children's Epoch as the first of several firsts Soong created for the new China's women and children: the first boarding nursery and kindergarten, the first maternity and child health hospital, the first children's palace, the first children's art theatre, and the first comprehensive children's magazine. Her guiding principle, as her biographers summarise it, was that the most valuable things should be given to children.

Founding on 1 April 1950

Soong Ching-ling wanted the China Welfare Institute to create a publication belonging to children themselves, one that would fly into thousands of households and every corner of the country. On 1 April 1950, Children's Epoch began publication in Shanghai as a semi-monthly magazine, founded by the China Welfare Fund and Soong personally. She inscribed the magazine's title in her own handwriting and wrote its founding message. Multiple accounts describe it in the same terms: the first comprehensive children's magazine of the new China, founded just six months after the People's Republic itself.

The founding came at a moment when children's magazines mattered out of proportion to their size. In the early years of the People's Republic, film, radio and television were not very accessible, especially in rural areas, and publishing was being nationalised and centralised during the 1950s. Children's magazines were important tools of education and socialisation at every level of schooling — and they were interactive publications, full of puzzles and quizzes to solve, models to make or draw, songs to sing and stories to retell with the child's own experiences.

Content and celebrated contributors

From the beginning, Children's Epoch carried fiction, fairy tales, poetry, children's songs, crosstalk dialogue and fairy-tale plays. Under Soong Ching-ling's appeal, a remarkable roster of famous figures wrote for it. The China Welfare Institute's history names, among the writers, Ba Jin, Bing Xin, Guo Moruo, Ye Shengtao, Ru Zhijuan, Chen Bochui and Yan Wenjing; among the artists, the painter Feng Zikai, the animator Wan Laiming and the cartoonist Zhang Leping, creator of Sanmao; among the scientists, the mathematician Su Buqing and the physicist Xie Xide; and among the performers, the composer Huang Zhun and the crosstalk artist Hou Baolin. It was, in effect, a national cultural who's who assembled for child readers.

Its most famous serialisation was by Bing Xin, China's best-loved writer for children. Her celebrated letters to young readers, written in a later series as More Letters to Young Readers and Third Letters to Young Readers, were first serialised in Children's Epoch — a direct link between the magazine and one of the classics of modern Chinese children's literature, whose original Letters to Young Readers of the 1920s had effectively opened the field of Chinese children's prose. In content, the institute's history says, the magazine fused the literary, the informative, the entertaining and the participatory, and presented the new outlook of children in the new society.

Readership, age level and standing in the 1950s

Within the consolidated, grade-organised children's publishing system of the 1950s, Children's Epoch occupied a precise niche: it was the magazine for children in the third and fourth years of primary school, the step above Little Friend, which served the first and second years. When a Children's Publishing House was established in Beijing in 1956 under the direct control of the Communist Youth League, national and regional children's magazines were further consolidated and centralised — and in that landscape, the King's College London account identifies the twice-monthly Children's Epoch and Little Friend as the most widely distributed children's magazines in China.

The magazine's own record supports that standing: by 1955, its circulation already stood first among Chinese periodicals of its kind. Because it appeared frequently, it could promote special holidays, current issues and official campaigns to its readers, and researchers use its covers and contents — as they use Little Friend's — as primary evidence for how childhood was organised and imagined in the Mao era.

Suspension during the Cultural Revolution

Children's Epoch's first life ended with the Cultural Revolution. On 16 October 1966 the magazine ceased publication as the upheaval swept through Chinese publishing; Little Friend and most other periodicals likewise suspended publication from 1966. A magazine that had been created as the new China's gift to its children fell silent for more than a decade, and the generation of children who would have read it in the late 1960s and 1970s grew up without it. Unlike many suspended titles, however, Children's Epoch had an institutional home determined to bring it back: the China Welfare Institute, and the personal legacy of Soong Ching-ling, stood behind it.

Revival in 1978 and the move to monthly publication

In November 1977, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic approved the resumption of Children's Epoch, and on 1 April 1978 — exactly twenty-eight years after its founding date — the magazine was relaunched. In 1983 it changed from a semi-monthly to a monthly magazine, the rhythm at which it continued in its later life. The revival restored not just a title but a continuity: a magazine founded by Soong Ching-ling, who lived until 1981 and so saw her children's magazine publishing again in the reform era that followed the Cultural Revolution.

Later descriptions of the magazine presented it to a new generation of parents and teachers in familiar terms: a monthly for primary-school readers, blending the literary, the informative and the entertaining with interactive activities, with columns ranging from puzzles and classic stories to nursery rhymes, a fairy-tale hut, mazes, observation features, comic strips and teachers' notes. Subscription listings put its suitable readership at primary-school children roughly seven to twelve years old, together with their teachers and parents.

The publishing house behind the magazine

The magazine's publishing lineage is preserved in the history of its Shanghai publisher. The China Welfare Institute's Children's Epoch publishing house was converted to a state-owned enterprise in January 1980; in June 1984 it began publishing a children's computing magazine, and in January 1985 it launched the picture magazine Haha Huabao. In August 2007 the Children's Epoch house was merged with the China Welfare Institute's book publishing house to form a combined China Welfare Institute Press, which in December 2010 was reorganised as a limited company under the name China Zhongfu Association Publishing — the publisher that carried the magazine's name and archive into the twenty-first century. The magazine and China Today thus share an unusual distinction: both began as China Welfare Institute magazines founded under Soong Ching-ling, one for China's children and one for the outside world.

Place alongside Little Friend

No account of Children's Epoch is complete without its partner title. Little Friend, founded in Shanghai in 1922, served the youngest primary pupils; Children's Epoch, founded twenty-eight years later by a very different China, served the next two school years. Together, as the King's College London and British Museum account puts it, they were the most widely distributed children's magazines of the Mao era — the two magazines a Chinese schoolchild of the 1950s and early 1960s was most likely to read. Where Little Friend represented continuity with the republican-era children's publishing of the 1920s, Children's Epoch represented the new state's own creation: a magazine founded by the People's Republic, for its children, within months of the state's birth. The contrast and the pairing together explain much about children's publishing in twentieth-century China.

Legacy

Children's Epoch's legacy rests on three verified foundations. It was the first comprehensive children's magazine of the People's Republic of China, created in April 1950 by Soong Ching-ling, who wrote its title in her own hand. It drew the finest writers, artists and scientists of its time into writing for children, and serialised Bing Xin's later letters to young readers for the first time. And by the publisher's own accounting, across its long life it reached a cumulative readership counted in the hundreds of millions — the China Welfare Institute's history credits it with accompanying the spiritual growth of hundreds of millions of readers and warming the childhood memories of several generations. Few magazines anywhere can claim to have been, quite so literally, a gift from a nation's founding generation to its children.