Treading a Different Path: Thoughts from Childhood Studies in Chinese History

The author of A Tender Voyage , a study of childhood in Chinese history, Ping-chen Hsiung has surveyed the initial achievements of childhood studies in China and explains how a new emphasis on cultural history and the new importance of tracking human development has made childhood an inviting field for "creativity and ambition." In her provocative narrative of recent Chinese intellectual developments, she challenges scholars of childhood to "both enhance and shake up" history and childhood studies by questioning very basic assumptions such as human development being inevitably linear and social change as based in modern notions of time. Her profoundly destabilizing questions lay the groundwork for her own call for historians to shake up not only childhood studies but also, potentially, all studies.-M.S.