Children as the future of China : Lu Xun's contribution to the development of modern Chinese children's and young adult literature

This paper focuses on the unique contribution by Lu Xun in the development of Chinese Children’s Literature in the 20th Century, particularly as to ways in which Lu Xun’s ideas influenced the children of that period and its effects on the development of modern Chinese children’s literature. It examines a number of Lu Xun’s representative writings—about children, his essays, his novels, his poems, his scribbles—as not only his criticising the evils of constructs of childhood as feudalistic and inhumane, but also as his revealing the essence of such constructs as fostering children as obedient slaves in their adult years. This paper thus explores Lu Xun’s view of children developing as complete persons based on the twin aspects of spiritual and physical existence, which implies not only gaining freedom but also changing the social world so that this could happen.E