The Little Messiah And The New Citizen

In the modern times,Christian missionaries that were devoted to children's undertaking in China participated not only in opening up schools,founding news agencies,and translating books,but also in constructing the concept of children in China.This paper proceeds from the literary works translated by missionaries to explore the emergence and changes of their concept of Chinese children.With children as the method,this paper pays attention to the dialogue between missionaries and May Fourth writers so as to reflect on the role of translated works of missionaries in the social transition period from the late Qing dynasty to the “May Fourth Movement”.The body part of this paper consists of three chapters.First,the image of abandoned children in the translated works of missionaries as “little adults” and “weird children”is explored,and the concept of “the little Messiah” constructed by missionaries is discovered.Following that,this paper deeply examines their intimidation strategies,such as missionaries' narrative which “delivers an alarming signal to the world”,and discusses Chinese children's image,which is constructed as “the ignorant” or the opposite of “the little Messiah”.Finally,this paper combines “May Fourth Movement”and the emergence of the nationalism to further expound on the changes of the concept of children among missionaries and May Fourth writers,finding out the subject shaped by them in children's books as “the new citizen”.Since the founding of the Republic of China,children discovered by missionaries and May Fourth writers were carriers of allegory about Chinese national character.The Chinese children discovered by missionaries were “the ignorant”,who were in the infancy of “the little Messiah”.But “the ignorant” that was regarded as the essence of the wicked Chinese children was contradictory to the potential of “the little Messiah”,which shows that there is an irreconcilable paradox in missionaries' narrative.This means that their plans and imagination of transforming China was limited in their own religious and colonial perspectives,and they failed to imagine how Chinese culture can come through the awkward "childhood".However,their attempts could indirectly outline the diagram of China's discovery of children and construction of modern subject in the imperialist system.In this system,the Chinese children discovered by May Fourth writers were “the new citizens” in their childhood times,and modern subjects in their infancy,which could reflect their incomplete breakthrough of the ignorant essence.