From Young Pioneers to Little Red Soldiers: Internationalism and the Making of Mao’s Children

• In Event: 235. Two-Part Panel: Aesthetics and Political Cultures in the PRC, 1949-1966. Part Two: Enacting the New Culture: Scripts and Practices Leading to the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

The early PRC period saw an upsurge in the number of transnational exchanges between Chinese children and the children of other countries. Meanwhile the Young Pioneer organization was imported from the Soviet Union to help structure children’s experience and learning. By examining the trope of “international correspondence” between children in 1950s films and the visual imaginings of Chinese children on the covers of children’s magazines, this paper shows that the newly established Communist government not only tried to construct children as future national citizens, but also as young pioneers with an internationalist consciousness who were part of the Socialist Bloc led by the Soviets. Yet from the very beginning, tensions existed between learning from the Soviet model and creating a new children’s culture with clear Chinese characteristics. The second part of this paper studies little red soldiers and their role in producing the Mao cult by analyzing the children’s journal The Little Red Soldier (hong xiaobing红小兵), which was one of the most popular children’s magazines during the Cultural Revolution. It shows how the Mao cult became an effective pedagogical tool to train children to be strong successors of both the Chinese revolution and the world revolution. Ultimately, by analysing the transformation of children from the young pioneers to the little red soldiers, this paper aims to recast the complex relationship between the cultural and ideological engineering of children in the first decade of the PRC regime and the radical political developments in the 1960s.

Author

• Lanjun Xu, National University of Singapore