Save the Children: Nation, Childrearing, and the Modern Self in Republican-Era Chinese Literature 1911-1949
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Date
2020-09-24
Authors
Chou, Yu Chih (Clay)
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My dissertation examines the modern ideological concept of children and individualism in Republican Chinese literature. It draws upon eugenics discourse, ideological essays and fictional stories to examine the emergence of the modern individual amid the tensions within the ideological call to revolutionize the traditional Confucian family in order to build a modern Chinese nation. Linking Chinese nation building with evolutionary thinking and eugenics discourse, my research explores how parenthood was inevitable for modern Chinese men and women and how the experience of raising children revealed conflicts between self, family, and nation in Chinese modernity.
In response to the perception that China was the “Sick Man of Asia,” intellectuals developed what I call a developmental eugenics narrative about the need to produce a generation of children who are biologically and spiritually advanced so that China could defend itself against both imperialist and colonialist encroachment. This developmental eugenic thinking, I argue, permeated Republican fictional stories in which children organically arrive in a modern conjugal relationship between a man and a woman. Contradicting the notion of the modern family as both the building block of the modern Chinese nation and the producer of future Chinese citizens, the fictional modern family often struggles to meld its two functions. These fictional men and women face their new parental responsibilities as they also struggle to uphold their recently acquired modern personhood. Despite their focus on “saving the children,” a famous slogan coined in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary,” Republican writers often depict the act of parenting as a sacrifice that modern individuals do not want to make. In consequence, the fictional modern family fails to transform into the imagined nation-building modern family.
My research reinforces and advances current ideas about the convoluted and paradoxical nature of individualism in Chinese modernity. It points out the reproductive imperative within the family revolution discourse coinciding with Chinese nation building. Analyzing the fictional stories written by Republican radicals through the lens of the developmental eugenics narrative suggests that Republican radicals struggled to surrender their individualism for the sake of Chinese nation building when it came to parenting the next generation.
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Keywords
Chinese Literature, Chinese Modernity, Evolutionary Thinking and Eugenics, Family Revolution and Nation Building, Language, Literature and Linguistics, Republican China