About Children's Literature

Children's Literature

Overview

Children's Literature (Ertong Wenxue) is a monthly magazine for young readers published in Beijing, China. Founded in 1963, it is China's flagship children's literary monthly, publishing stories, fairy tales and poems by the country's leading children's authors under the publishing system of the China Writers Association and the national children's publishing houses. Its publisher describes it as a leading children's magazine launched in 1963 that has given hundreds of millions of tweens and teenagers enjoyable reading, accompanying them through the good and bad days of their youth. Few periodicals anywhere can claim a readership measured in the hundreds of millions across six decades, but Children's Literature belongs to the generation of Chinese magazines that were present in schools, libraries and homes across the country. A selection volume of outstanding works from the magazine's first twenty years, from 1963 to 1983, was later collected by thirty-four libraries around the world — the highest library uptake recorded for Chinese children's books of its kind — and its contents included work by celebrated writers such as Bing Xin. This profile traces the magazine's founding, its publishing world, and its place in the history of reading for Chinese children.

Founding in 1963

Children's Literature was launched in 1963, in a decade when the People's Republic was systematically building a children's publishing infrastructure. The institutions behind that effort frame the magazine's birth. China Children's Publishing House had been founded on 1 June 1956 under the jurisdiction of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, as a national-level agency for juvenile and children's books; in its first decade, to 1966, it published 729 children's books with total copies exceeding 100 million, and it also started children's magazines such as Middle School Students, We Love Science and Children's Literature, which became children's companions for generations as they grew up. The magazine thus began not as a commercial experiment but as part of a deliberate national provision: a literary monthly through which the new children's literature of socialist China — written by professional authors, edited by specialists — would reach young readers in every province. Its 1963 founding places it among the earliest enduring titles of that system, and its continuation as a monthly under China's children's-literature establishment gives it a institutional lineage few children's magazines in the world can match.

The Publishing House Behind It

The magazine's modern publisher is the China Children's Press and Publication Group (CCPPG), described by the translation organisation Paper Republic, in material copied from the publisher, as the largest children's press and publication house in China. The group was formed by consolidating China Teenagers Press, founded in 1951, and China Children's Publishing House, founded in 1956. According to the 2012 and 2013 press and publication reports of the state administration, the group ranked first in total economic activity among all children's publishers in China; it owned five newspapers and eleven magazines with annual circulation of over 140 million copies in 2013, and published over 1,500 book titles annually, around 500 of them new, spanning picture books, comics, juvenile and young adult fiction and historical titles. Children's Literature is the group's and the wider system's flagship literary title within that portfolio — the magazine the publisher itself singles out, alongside its circulation figures, when presenting Chinese children's publishing to the world. Being the literary flagship of the country's largest children's publisher explains both the magazine's contributor base and its reach into school and public libraries nationwide.

What the Magazine Publishes

Children's Literature publishes stories, fairy tales and poems for young readers — the tweens and teenagers its publisher describes — written by China's leading children's authors. The monthly format matters for its genre. A literary magazine for children does several jobs at once: it entertains its immediate readers; it gives professional children's writers a regular venue shorter than a book, in which new stories can appear quickly; and it builds, issue by issue, the canon of what a generation reads. Fairy tales and poems suit younger readers within its range, while longer stories serve the teenage audience that Chinese children's publishing treats as a distinct readership. Because the magazine is attached to the China Writers Association's children's-literature system — the professional body through which China's children's authors are organised — its pages draw on the country's established children's writers as well as new voices. Reference descriptions of the magazine consistently emphasise this nurturing function: it has nurtured several generations of writers as well as readers, a pairing that captures how literary magazines work in the Chinese system, developing authors and audiences together inside one institution.

The First Twenty Years: The 1963–1983 Selection

The strongest single piece of evidence for the magazine's standing is bibliometric. A study of Chinese children's books collected by libraries across the world found that Selection of Outstanding Works from Children's Literature from 1963 to 1983, published in 1983, had been collected by thirty-four world libraries, ranking first among all the Chinese children's books surveyed. The volume, well illustrated, gathered famous children's literature writers published in the magazine across its first two decades, including Bing Xin — the most beloved Chinese children's writer of the twentieth century — and authors such as Liu Zhen and Ru Zhijuan. That a magazine's twenty-year anthology should be the most widely held Chinese children's book in world libraries says two things. Domestically, it confirms that the magazine concentrated the best children's writing of its era; its pages were where the canon was made. Internationally, it shows that when foreign libraries sought to represent Chinese children's literature, they reached for this magazine's contents. The 1963–1983 span also silently records survival: those decades included the Cultural Revolution, when children's publishing, like all Chinese publishing, was disrupted and children's literature was recast as political instruction. The magazine's first twenty years, anthologised in 1983, span both the building and the recovery of the field.

Children's Literature in Its National Context

To understand the magazine, it helps to see the field it leads. Children's literature in China emerged as a distinct genre in the early twentieth century, championed by New Culture figures such as Lu Xun, who argued in the pages of New Youth in 1919 that writers should create a distinct literature for children. Children's periodicals were among its earliest engines — magazines such as Children's World and Little Friend, both launched in Shanghai in 1922, built the first mass child readerships — and after 1949 a surge in children's publishing created the system into which Children's Literature was born in 1963. Scholarship on the field describes how that literature served successive visions of childhood — the modern child, then the revolutionary child of the Maoist period, whose stories were often readily seen, in context, as instruments of political socialisation — before liberalisation in the 1980s and 1990s set off a new growth of children's writing. A flagship monthly founded in 1963 lived through all of the post-1949 phases of that story: it is one of the few institutions of Chinese children's literature whose run connects the socialist construction period, the Cultural Revolution and the reform era in a single continuous title, which is precisely why its archive matters to historians.

Generations of Readers

The publisher's claim for the magazine — that it has given hundreds of millions of tweens and teenagers enjoyable reading, accompanying them through the good and bad days of their youth — is a circulation claim with a human meaning. In a country of China's size, a nationally distributed school-age monthly sustained over six decades accumulates readers on a scale no Western children's magazine approaches. Generations of Chinese adults who grew up after 1963 encountered serious short fiction and poetry first, or most regularly, in magazines of this kind: in school libraries, in classroom reading and in subscriptions arranged by parents and schools. The phrase in the publisher's description, accompanying them through good and bad days, points to the magazine's presence across both ordinary schooldays and the disruptions of the decades it spanned. Children's magazines are unusually formative reading — for many readers they are the first periodical that is theirs — and a title that has held that position in China since 1963 holds a place in the collective memory of Chinese reading that goes well beyond its literary contents.

The Magazine Today

Children's Literature continues as a Beijing monthly within China's children's publishing system, now centred on the China Children's Press and Publication Group — the country's largest children's publisher, with its 1,500 titles a year and eleven magazines. The environment has changed around it: Chinese children's publishing is a large commercial market, international picture books and young-adult fiction in translation compete for the same readers, and digital reading has transformed children's habits as thoroughly as adults'. Within that market, a literary monthly founded in 1963 competes on different terms from a new commercial title. Its assets are institutional and canonical: the backing of the national children's-literature establishment, a contributor base of leading children's authors, a backlist whose first twenty years alone produced the most widely held Chinese children's book in world libraries, and a name that parents and teachers have recognised for sixty years. Reference descriptions of the magazine still introduce it without qualification as China's flagship children's literary monthly — a description that reflects its position at the head of its category rather than any single circulation figure.

Standing and Legacy

Children's Literature's significance can be stated plainly. Founded in Beijing in 1963 as part of the People's Republic's purpose-built children's publishing system, it became the flagship literary monthly for Chinese children and teenagers, publishing stories, fairy tales and poems by the country's leading children's authors. Its publisher records that it has accompanied hundreds of millions of young readers; library evidence records that its selected works of 1963–1983 are held by thirty-four world libraries, more than any comparable Chinese children's book. It has nurtured generations of writers as well as readers, within a publishing group that remains China's largest for children. In the long history of Chinese children's periodicals — from Children's World and Little Friend in 1922 to the digital present — Children's Literature is the title that carried the literary monthly for children through the entire second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. For anyone studying how China has written for its children, its six decades of monthly issues are among the first sources to consult.