| Since reform and opening-up in China,childrearing has regained its attention from the government and society.A critical clue in the modernization project throughout the 1980s is to train parents to be competent in oder to cultivate ideal children through scientific method.Relevant researches discussed child-rearing mostly on a structural level and overlooked cultural aspect;and provided more policy advice than theoretical study.The dissertation discusses the questions regarding the discursive construction of child-rearing knowledge and its implication of social transformation on the bias of social criticism.Through discourse analysis of the textual form A Must-read for Parents(fumubidu),a popular child-rearing magazine which was published in 1980,the findings of the dissertation are as follows:Firstly,there are some marked changes in childrearing knowledge production in transitional society.Since 1980,Children are becoming more and more precious and priceless.Motherhood is important to children.The standard by which the magazine advised parents to educate their child changes from cultivating intelligent children in the 1980s,raising high-quality children in the 1990s to fostering happy kids at present.The parenting discourse takes on three trends of changes:A democratic trend is presented in child-parental relationship.A technical trend is shown in childrearing methods.There has been a commercial trend in childrearing concepts.Parents are advised to foster happy kids with child-centered,expert-guided,emotionally absorbing,labor-intensive,and financially expensive.Secondly,The child rearing knowledge have been constructed by diversified discourse.The knowledge of cultivating intelligent children in the 1980s was constructed by the discourse of country,which embodied the yearn for talents,especially for technical talents,in the industrialization with poor but promising foundation and implied the ideologies that science and technology was important to modernization program.The knowledge of raising high-quality children in the 1990s was constructed by the suzhi discourse and the gender discourse,which embodied the fact that competitive talents were demanded with the process of deepening reform,establishing market economy,and further involving in the global economy system of capitalism.Since the 21st century,the discourse of constructing qualified parents and ideal children witnessed a transformation that turned from emphasizing state discourse in the past and suzhi discourse to multiple discourses,besides state discourse and suzhi discourse,experts discourse,consumption discourse and gender discourse are also involved in the construction of current child-rearing knowledge in different degree.Thirdly,Conflicts and compromises among the government,market,families and gender can be revealed by the transformation of parenting discourse.Emphasizing on responsibility of family and individual,some social problems are increasingly defined as family issues and parenting problems.The construction of child-rearing knowledge reflects that dominant classes eagerly expect to embrace globalization and consolidate the class status through modernity of rearing child,and also illuminates the dual aims of government that not only develops globally competitive children,but also plans to cultivate successors who believe in collectivist value.In addition,it reveals the domination of elites and experts on the public and parents respectively,the invasion of the market into family,as well as the class and gender inequality.Fourthly,parenting discourse in China is developing towards a de-political,de-instrumental,and individual-oriented direction.But linear explanation cannot be applied to understand this transformation.The transformation embodies a developing process of compressed modernity since reform and opening up.Compressed modernity means not only does the country develop rapidly in a short period of time,but it also suffers from imbalance politically,economically,culturally and among different aspects of the society.It also brings about competition,collision and mixture between modern and traditional elements,as well as global and domestic ones.By looking into the production of childrearing knowledge,such a imbalance in development can be detected.On basis of the results above,how to explain the change of parenting discourse is further discussed.there are three theories which are often applied to interpretation of the change in parenting discourse.The change of parenting discourse is maybe the result of modernity process,the construction of childhood culture and history,the result of cultural diffusion.This study believes these theories cannot be entirely applied to explain the China’s experience.Compressed modernity can explain this phenomenon instead.It is the government’s expectation for children to receive the best of western cultures while inherit and be loyal to the core value of socialism,and in the meanwhile,absorb the essence of traditional Chinese culture.Some sorts of hegemony thinking and power relation can be reflected from this compressed figure of ideal children.The domain of child-rearing has become a key point of the struggle for discourse dominance among consumerism,technocracy,feminism,democratization and authority.On basis of the results above,responses have been made to the literature about the relationship between children and modernity since the modern times.Generally,two opinions can be drawn from relevant studies:one is an instrumental concept of children,which means that a strong desire persists behind the concern over children from the turn of the 20th century to the times of the reform and opening-up,that is,to realize modernization through children.Another probes into the independent and individualized features on modern rearing cultural in China.As to the former,this study demonstrates the conclusion in some degree.But the instrumentalizing child image is invisible in the text in magazine since 21st century.This can be viewed as a detachment of children from national consciousness in the public culture domain.However,official statements towards their relationship hardly changed.In short,instrumental targeting of children in China has been undergoing a complex change,in which the political part remains while the economical and cultural part alter.Regarding to the second one,it is partial,to some degree to concentrate to children’s individuality.The individuality portrayed in the magazine is hardly a positive one which we imagined,rather,it is a product of the transition from the pubic to the personal domain. |
