Community and Individuality in Chinese and American Picturebooks: A Contrastive Study of Constructs of Childhood

This article explores how influential picturebooks in China and the United States reveal differences in the constructs of childhood and education between Asia and the West through an analysis of the cultural basis of their production and their common underlying script (story or narrative patterns expressing how a sequence of events or actions is expected to unfold). It finds that although these works bear many similarities in their scripts, they are underpinned by very different representations of community and individuality. The Chinese picturebooks in question are about testing the comparative worth of (usually three) young people by setting them a task, and they thus reinforce the schema that individual achievements are a natural result of community. In contrast, the American picturebooks under investigation are based on a script that involves having faith in and putting one’s talent to use, and thus enhance a schema that community is a natural result of personal achievements. Although societies continue to change, such scripts and schemas have remained functional and had their transformative potential until today.