About China Children's News

China Children's News

China Children's News (Chinese: 中国少年报; pinyin: Zhongguo Shaonian Bao) is a Chinese-language newspaper for schoolchildren published in Beijing by the China Children's Press and Publication Group. Founded in 1951, it grew up alongside the Young Pioneers of China, the Communist Youth League-linked children's organisation, and for generations was many Chinese children's first newspaper, mixing news, science, stories, games and model-student reporting in language for young readers. Historically distributed through schools nationwide, it remains the flagship title of China's specialist children's press.

Founded in 1951, with the new children's movement

The newspaper's founding in 1951 places it at the creation of organised childhood in the People's Republic. The children's movement it served had been established on 13 October 1949, days after the founding of the PRC, as the Youth and Children of China Movement; it took its present name, the Young Pioneers of China, in June 1953. The publisher side of the paper shares the date: the China Children's Press and Publication Group was formed by consolidating the China Teenagers Press, founded in 1951, and the China Children's Publishing House, founded in 1956. Paper, publisher and movement are thus all products of the same founding moment, when the new state set out to give its children their own institutions — including, from 1951, their own national newspaper.

The Young Pioneers' newspaper

The Young Pioneers of China is a mass youth organisation of the Chinese Communist Party for children between the ages of six and fourteen, run by the Communist Youth League of China; its members wear the famous red scarf, and on reaching fourteen they leave the Pioneers and may go on to join the Youth League. Reference works list China Children's News, with China Teenagers' News, as the Young Pioneers' newspaper. That status shaped everything about the paper: its distribution ran through the Pioneer organisation in schools, its content spoke to members as members, and its model-student reporting celebrated the children the organisation held up as examples. It was less a commercial children's paper than the printed organ of Chinese childhood's official institution.

A child's first newspaper

For generations the paper was, as its histories note, many Chinese children's first newspaper. Its formula mixed news, science, stories, games and model-student reporting in language calibrated for young readers — short texts, large ideas made simple, and children's own contributions. In the early decades of the PRC, when film, radio and television were not very accessible, especially in rural areas, print carried an exceptional weight in children's lives, and a national children's newspaper distributed through schools reached readers that no commercial publication could. To have read China Children's News at school is a shared memory across several generations of Chinese adults.

Through the Cultural Revolution and restoration

The paper's parent movement passed through the central trauma of modern Chinese history, and the children's press with it. During the Cultural Revolution the Young Pioneers was dismantled and replaced with the Little Red Guards — the younger counterparts of the Red Guards — sanctioned from December 1967; children's publications across China were renamed for the new buzzword or ceased publication. The Young Pioneers was re-established in October 1978, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the children's press was rebuilt around it. China Children's News belongs to the restored order: the Pioneer newspaper of the reform era, serving a movement whose constitution had been passed on International Children's Day, 1 June 1954, and whose organisation once again enrolled the nation's six-to-fourteen-year-olds.

Contents: news, science, stories and games

The paper's contents follow the classic children's-newspaper recipe, refined over decades. News is rewritten for children — national events, science achievements and stories of other children's lives, in language a primary-school reader can manage. Science popularisation introduces young readers to the natural world and to technology. Stories and serialised fiction carry the entertainment load, alongside games and puzzles. And model-student reporting — accounts of exemplary Pioneer members, their study, their good deeds and their honours — performs the paper's formative mission, showing readers the child they are encouraged to become. The mixture is deliberate: instruction and pleasure bound in the same four pages, so that the newspaper is both a treat and a lesson.

Distribution through schools

Historically the paper was distributed through schools nationwide — the distribution system that made a national children's readership possible. Pioneer organisation existed in virtually every primary and middle school, and subscription through the school put the same issue, on the same week, into children's hands from Beijing to the rural counties. That school-based circulation distinguishes the Chinese children's press from its commercial counterparts elsewhere: the paper's market was organised, not found, and its print runs served an enrolled readership of Pioneer-age children numbering in the tens of millions.

The China Children's Press and Publication Group

The paper's publisher is the largest children's press and publication house in China. The China Children's Press and Publication Group, formed by consolidating the China Teenagers Press (1951) and the China Children's Publishing House (1956), owned five newspapers and eleven magazines with an annual circulation of over 140 million copies in 2013, and ranked first among Chinese children's publishers in total economic scale in the official press and publication reports of 2012 and 2013. It publishes over 1,500 book titles annually, around 500 of them new. China Children's News is the flagship newspaper of that house — the title from which its newspaper line descends and the one most closely identified with its founding generation.

Children's publishing in the Mao era and after

Historians of Chinese children's publishing emphasise how much work print did in the early People's Republic: children's magazines and newspapers promoted literacy and general knowledge as well as official values, and publishing was nationalised and centralised in the 1950s to carry approved messages for mass mobilisation. China Children's News, founded in the first wave of that system, is one of its longest-lived survivals. Its persistence into the digital age — within a group whose magazines, such as Children's Literature, launched in 1963, accompanied hundreds of millions of young readers — testifies to the durability of the school-distributed children's newspaper as a Chinese institution.

Place in China's press

Among Chinese newspapers, China Children's News occupies a category of its own: a national newspaper written not about children but for them, published continuously in identity since 1951 as the Young Pioneers' paper and the flagship of the specialist children's press. Generations of Chinese readers met journalism first in its pages. As a historical source it is equally distinctive — a week-by-week record, in children's language, of what the Chinese state wished its youngest citizens to know, admire and become.

The group's book programme shows the same breadth as its periodicals. Alongside its five newspapers and eleven magazines, the China Children's Press and Publication Group publishes picture books, comic books, juvenile and young adult fiction and historical titles for young readers — over 1,500 titles a year, of which around 500 are new. Its magazine Children's Literature, launched in 1963, is credited with giving hundreds of millions of young readers their reading pleasure across good days and bad. The newspaper sits at the head of this house as its oldest title: the weekly paper through which the group first learned, in 1951, to address China's children directly, and through which the Young Pioneers still speaks to its members in print.