The Visibility and Visuality of Children in Modern China: Cuteness, Play, and Outdoor Activities in Children’s Magazines

Abstract: This article illuminates the “pictorial turn” in representations of children from premodern to modern China. In premodern China, children were often depicted as miniature adults, with no clear signs of infantilization, or as symbols of the desire for abundant offspring and familial prosperity. Play was rarely depicted, but when it appeared, it was usually confined to garden settings under the watchful eyes of maternal figures, reinforcing ideals of domesticity and protection. However, during the May Fourth era, visual depictions of children underwent a radical transformation: they began to appear as cute, autonomous individuals engaged in outdoor play with their peers. This shift was not merely an aesthetic evolution but a reconfiguration of childhood itself. The new imagery reflected emerging conceptions of children as independent and naturally inclined toward exploration—ideas that, while now commonplace, marked a profound departure from earlier traditions. This article argues that this transformation extended beyond artistic style to signal a deeper ideological shift in how childhood was understood. Modern notions of childhood in China were shaped by transnational Euro-American theories, particularly the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, which emphasized children’s innate instincts and individuality. The cutification of children in visual representations—framing childhood as a time of natural freedom—was, paradoxically, tied to a nationalistic agenda. Beneath the celebration of children’s “natural” instincts lay the expectation that they would grow into strong national citizens, ultimately serving and saving the country. This contrast between the natural and the national reveals the underlying tensions in modern China’s reimagining of childhood—a rhetoric of liberation that, in practice, aligned with the demands of the state.