Memories of the Revolution Childhood and the Modernization Childhood in China: 1950s–1980s

Abstract

This article reflects on the authors’ personal experiences with schooling in China from the 1950s to the 1980s. We discuss socially salient identities at that time period and how these shaped our lives, in schools and outside. Our analytical concern is the disciplining of childhood to align children’s lives with the Party-state’s political goals, especially through the strategy of exemplars. We elaborate on our experiences with processes of constructing the model student in school, the discourse of revolution child heroes in the ideological context of class struggles, and later the discourse of the scientist child helping the modernization cause. The essay concludes with some reflective remarks about the contested remembering of socialist childhoods as a mark of the postsocialist transition in China.