About Children's World

Children's World

Children's World, in Chinese Ertong Shijie, was a Shanghai children's magazine launched in 1922 by the Commercial Press under editor Zheng Zhenduo. Launched in the same year as Little Friend, it became, with that magazine, one of the two most prominent children's journals of Republican China, each achieving biweekly circulations of over 20,000 copies. Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library highlights its early volumes among the landmark Chinese children's magazines of the twentieth century. It mixed stories, songs, pictures and knowledge for the first generation of Chinese children to be addressed by publishers as readers in their own right.

1922: the birth of the Chinese children's magazine

Children's World appeared at a precise cultural moment. Children's literature emerged in China as a distinct genre in the early twentieth century, as children's periodicals began to appear, Western children's books were translated, and the New Culture Movement's advocacy of vernacular Chinese created a language children could actually read. The year 1922 was the annus mirabilis of the Chinese children's magazine: in Shanghai, the Commercial Press launched Children's World under Zheng Zhenduo, and the Zhonghua Book Company launched Little Friend under Li Jinhui. The two became the most prominent children's journals of the era. They were commercial ventures — the Chinese publishing industry became highly dependent on the lucrative children's literature market, with presses such as Beixin and Xiandai launching rival children's magazines, Little Student and Modern Child, in an attempt to compete — but they were also cultural projects, staffed by the leading literary intellectuals of the day, who saw childhood reading as a foundation of the new China they hoped to build.

Zheng Zhenduo and the Commercial Press

The magazine's founding editor was Zheng Zhenduo, one of the central figures of modern Chinese letters: a translator and theorist of world literature, a historian of Chinese literature and an advocate of children's reading. Under Zheng, figures such as Ye Shengtao — whose fairy-tale collection The Scarecrow became a founding text of Chinese children's literature — and the translators and writers of the Literary Research Association circle shaped the new field; Zheng himself championed the importation and creation of children's literature, and his editorial work on Children's World was part of the same enterprise as his translation of world classics for young readers. The publisher, the Commercial Press, was China's largest modern publishing house, dominant in textbooks and general publishing from its Shanghai base; its children's magazine applied the house's production strengths — good paper, illustrations, national distribution through its branch network — to the new child reader. Children's World was, in short, not a marginal production but a flagship of the era's biggest publisher, edited by one of its most eminent literary men.

Contents: stories, songs and knowledge

Children's World offered its readers a miscellany designed for the whole child: stories and fairy tales, Chinese and translated; poems and songs; pictures and photographs; and knowledge features introducing nature, science, geography and the wider world. It belonged to the first wave of Chinese children's periodicals, which had begun with titles such as Educational Pictures for Children (1908-1925) and Fairy Tales (1909-1932), but it improved on them in scale and literary quality, drawing on the May Fourth generation of writers who were simultaneously inventing modern Chinese literature for adults. The magazine's early volumes, preserved at Princeton's Cotsen Children's Library, show the form at its best: vernacular language a schoolchild could follow, illustrations integrated with text, and a deliberate mixture of delight and instruction. For its readers — the children of the new urban, school-going China of the 1920s — it was likely their first experience of a publication made entirely for them.

Circulation and competition

The commercial scale of the leading children's magazines surprised contemporaries. Children's World and Little Friend each saw biweekly circulations of over 20,000 copies, at a time when most Chinese literary journals sold in the low thousands. Those figures explain the rush of competitors: the Beixin Book Company launched Little Student and Xiandai (Modern) Press launched Modern Child to contest the market the two leaders had created. Children's publishing had become one of the most reliable profit centres of the Shanghai industry, because its customers — schools and aspirant parents — bought steadily and because a successful children's magazine created readers for a publisher's books for years afterward. Children's World's run in this market made it a fixture of the 1920s and 1930s reading landscape, the Commercial Press's answer in the most contested new field in Chinese publishing.

The magazine in the history of children's literature

Histories of Chinese children's literature treat the magazines of 1922 as foundational. The period from 1917 to 1927 is regarded as the birth period of the field, when translation by figures such as Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo, the fairy tales of Ye Shengtao, Bing Xin's Letters to Young Readers and the school musicals of Li Jinhui created a modern children's literature almost from nothing — and the magazines were where much of it first appeared and where its audience was formed. Children's World, as the Commercial Press's vehicle edited by Zheng, stands at the centre of that story. Modern scholarship on Chinese children's literature — written in the comparative frame the field has had from the start, oscillating between tradition and modernity, national and international — returns repeatedly to the 1922 magazines as the moment the Chinese child reader was invented as a public.

Survival in the Cotsen collection

Children's World survives for researchers chiefly through library collections, above all the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton University, whose Chinese-language holdings include more than 45,000 items and whose strengths include twentieth-century children's magazines. Cotsen's cataloguing projects have reorganised and described its holdings of early volumes of Children's World (Er Tong Shi Jie) and Little Friend, both launched in Shanghai in 1922, presenting them as prominent titles in the collection. That a Shanghai children's magazine of the 1920s is now preserved and exhibited by an American research library reflects the judgement of modern scholarship: these ephemeral, brightly printed magazines are primary documents of how China imagined childhood, education and the future during its first republican decades, as revealing in their way as the era's literary journals for adults.

The Republican children's press in retrospect

Children's World's world did not last. The children's literature market of the 1920s and 1930s was disrupted by the war with Japan from 1937, when Shanghai's publishing industry scattered, and by the political transformation that followed; radical children's literature, a minor current in the Republican period, became dominant after 1949 under a new children's publishing system. The magazines of 1922 belong to the earlier, commercial and literary phase — the phase of Zheng Zhenduo, Ye Shengtao and the Commercial Press — and they are remembered as its finest products. Little Friend, Children's World's great contemporary, proved the longer-lived, continuing with suspensions for some ninety years; Children's World's fame rests on its early volumes and its founding moment rather than on longevity.

Legacy

Children's World's legacy is that of a founding document. Launched in 1922 by China's largest publisher and edited by Zheng Zhenduo, it helped create the Chinese children's magazine, proved that children constituted a national reading public of more than twenty thousand biweekly buyers, and gave the May Fourth generation's children's literature its most prestigious early home. Its preserved volumes at Princeton's Cotsen Library keep it in active scholarly use a century later. In the history of Chinese magazines, few titles can claim so much consequence from so early a date: before Children's World, China had scarcely imagined a magazine for children; after it, no publisher could ignore them.