"To write for children, and to write well": Protestant mission presses and the development of children’s literature in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century China

This article uses a new historicist approach to examine the complexrelationships between translators, writers, and missionary publishersin China, and their financial supporters in the United States and Britainto demonstrate how they influenced the development of Chinese children’sliterature. It focuses on the case of the American Presbyterian MissionPress, Chinese Religious Tract Society, and Christian Literature Societyfor China, publishers of many texts for children. The article argues thatthe Western mission presses shaped Chinese children’s literature in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century by introducing new narrativesthrough translation, highlighting the importance of including visual imagesin children’s texts by importing electrotypes and lithographic printsfrom the United States and Britain, and training Chinese students in newengraving and printing techniques which enabled them to establish theirown publishing houses

Baozou manhua (rage comics), internet humour and everyday life

Wang Nima launched baozoumanhua.com in 2008 to introduce rage comics (baozou manhua) to China after noticing its popularity in the USA. The emergence of baozou manhua signifies a new form of expression for ordinary netizens where they move from simply being consumers of comics to producers, combining image and text in a humorous way and distributing them via a wide variety of communication tools. This paper examines how the genre of baozou manhua enables Chinese netizens to vent about their everyday experiences and frustrations of daily life. It also explores how computer software technology and the Internet have influenced contemporary Chinese visual humour by focusing on the baozoumanhua.com Internet community. Although baozou manhua is an Internet phenomenon emerging from the specific sociopolitical context of contemporary China, examining this form of expression not only sheds light on popular online culture in China and the issues Chinese netizens grapple with but also provides an understanding of how digital visual culture changes across time and space as North American rage faces circulate around the world and garner new meaning after being appropriated and reinterpreted in the ‘interpretative community’ of Chinese cyberspace

China in a Book: Victorian Representations of the ‘Celestial Kingdom’ in William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel. Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire

Post-socialist femininity unleashed/restrained: reconfigurations of gender in Chinese television dramas

In post-socialist China, gender norms are marked by rising divorce rates (Kleinman et al.), shifting attitudes towards sex (Farrer; Yan), and a growing commercialisation of sex (Zheng). These phenomena have been understood as indicative of market reforms unhinging past gender norms. In the socialist period, the radical politics of the time moulded women as gender neutral even as state policies emphasised their feminine roles in maintaining marital harmony and stability(Evans). These ideas around domesticity bear strong resemblance to pre-socialist understandings of womanhood and family that anchored Chinese society before the Communists took power in 1949. In this pre-socialist understanding, women were categorised into a hierarchy that defined their rights as wives, mothers, concubines, and servants (Ebrey and Watson; Wolf and Witke). Women who transgressed these categories were regarded as potentially dangerous and powerfulenough to break up families and shake the foundations of Chinese society (Ahern). This paper explores the extent to which understandings of Chinese femininity have been reconfigured in the context of China’s post-1979 development, particularly after the 2000s

Changing Roles in a Changing Climate: The Bretton Woods Institutions and the Promotion of Sustainable Development.

Through structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) have been promoting a particular model of development in developing countries. However, the traditional model of "economic" development advocated by the BWIs has been criticised for contributing to environmental degradation generally and to increases in greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change. A variety of legal instruments and other mechanisms have been developed that seek to reverse this trend. The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) was adopted in 1992 and innovative mechanisms designed to help implementing the Convention such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) have been established in the World Bank. The purpose of the thesis is to evaluate whether the legal and quasi-legal instruments employed by the BWIs in promoting structural adjustment may serve as effective tools in assisting to implement the FCCC in developing countries. The effectiveness of these legal and quasi-legal instruments, including conditionality and policy-based lending, is examined in the context of the leverage of the BWIs in influencing developing countries. This thesis posits that the governance structure of the BWIs, perceived as asymmetrical by developing countries, has affected the relationship between the BWIs and developing countries and might have undermined the effectiveness of these instruments in promoting structural adjustment. This thesis shows that GEF has begun to employ instruments similar to SAPs such as conditionality and policy-based lending, but in combination with innovative features such as novel decision-making rules and closer links with multilaterally negotiated environmental agreements such as the FCCC. The present study, thus, proposes that these legal and quasi-legal instruments identified in the GEF might be more effective because of the innovative features of the GEF that help to improve the relationship between the World Bank and the developing countries. The interaction between treaty obligations of the FCCC and regular operations of the BWIs is further explored, and suggestions for reforming the SAPs and in further developing the innovative mechanisms of the World Bank are offered. The arguments presented in the thesis are illustrated through a case study comprising four developing countries of Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippine, and Thailand). By evaluating whether the experiences of the BWIs in promoting "economic" development can provide valuable insights into how they might promote "sustainable" development through assisting the implementation of the FCCC in developing countries, the thesis hopes to contribute to the evolving field of study on the interface between international financial institutions and international environmental law

Give, give; be always giving’: Children, Charity and China, 1890-1939

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph is included here: Before he reveals the answer to the riddle, nine-year-old Matty Bryan asks his father for a penny and his mother and grandmother for a halfpenny each. He then takes out his new missionary-box, explaining that the money is for ‘black people, to buy them Bibles, and to send them preachers to tell them about God, and how they’re to get to heaven; and Mr. Graham [his teacher] said that it was the same as giving them the Bread of life’ ( Elliott 1872, p. 17). This scene from Emily Elliott’s novella Matty’s Hungry Missionary-Box and the Message It Brought (1872) is an example of the creative ways children in nineteenth-century Britain were depicted as engaging in charity. Although not everyone agreed with the value of foreign missions, by the mid-nineteenth century, missionary societies such as the London Missionary Society (LMS, established 1795) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS, established 1799) had placed missionary boxes like Matty’s in many homes, and children were taught to donate regularly (Cox 2008, p. 97). According to historian Frank Prochaska ‘[n]owhere in the charitable world did the young play a more important part than in the evangelical missionary movement’ (1978, p. 103). While it is impossible to provide exact figures for the amount of money Victorian children raised for missionary societies, it was a significant amount . The funds raised supported missionary ships, paid for specific cots in hospitals, and sponsored ‘native teacher[s]’ (Prochaska 1978, p. 107; Thorne 1999, p. 126; Elleray 2011, pp. 229-230). In the early twentieth century, children were told that for one penny a week, they could help support the LMS’s eighty-three missionaries in China who were involved in the work of ‘leper asylums, training homes, orphanages and schools for both boys and girls’ (J.M.B. [c 1900], p. 15). &nbsp