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Those who opposed such indoctrination looked to international and traditional exemplars in their advocacy of protecting ‘the childlike heart’ \u7ae5\u5fc3, in children and in adults alike. The childlike heart, a concept known from the time of Mencius, featured in the writings of\u00a0Li Zhi (\u674e\u8d04, 1527-1602),\u00a0the late-Ming iconoclastic philosopher. Li’s ideas were now\u00a0praised by\u00a0writers like Lin Yutang \u6797\u8a9e\u5802 and reflected in the essays and art of like Feng Zikai \u8c50\u5b50\u6137, both of whom frequently feature in\u00a0China Heritage<\/em>.<\/p>\n As Li Zhi wrote (in Lin Yutang’s translation):<\/p>\n The child is the chrysalis of the man; the childlike heart is the original state of mind. Yet how does it come about that the original state of the mind, the childlike heart, can be lost? It starts when one sees and hears things that come to rule over the mind. When growing up, one is told about and shown various principles which come to hold sway, and thus is the childlike heart lost. With the passing of time one sees and hears more of the principles [of the world] and one’s knowledge increases daily… . These principles take the place of one’s heart and what one says is nothing but [a repetition] of these principles; they do not issue from one’s childlike heart. No matter how clever one’s words may be they are not sincere, and so it is that false men speak falsehoods, do false things and write false words. As soon as a person has thus falsified themselves, will not everyone they do in turn be false?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a review recommend the linguist Yuanren Chao’s \u8d99\u5143\u4efb accomplished translation of Lewis Carroll’s\u00a0Alice’s\u00a0Adventures in Wonderland<\/em>, the essayist and translator Zhou Zuoren \u5468\u4f5c\u4eba observed that:<\/p>\n Too many adults have lost entirely their childlike heart. It is as though the caterpillar, having turned into a butterfly, has absolutely nothing to do with its former self. this is a very sorry state of affairs. They have forgotten what it is like to be a child; not only are they incapable of appreciating the sensibilities of children \u2014 they lack any desire to nurture or protect their children and instead end up doing them harm.<\/p>\n \u2014 both quotes are from my\u00a0<\/em>An Artistic Exile: a life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975)<\/a>, pp.139 & 142.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n ***<\/p>\n Children as the harbingers of the future have been and remain a crucial aspect of Chinese Communist propaganda which, in its early decades, was profoundly influenced by the Soviet Union and its inculcation of young successors to the revolutionary cause (see, for example, the swearing-in ceremony for Soviet Young Pioneers here<\/a>). For Official China the cult of childhood, service, sacrifice and martyrdom remains central to the celebration of children. The groundwork for this was laid in the Communist base at Yan’an and in the areas under Party control during the Sino-Japanese conflict. Children were part of the revolutionary vanguard of the war and they would feature as agents for Party change in the People’s Republic after 1949. From 1950, Child’s Day was to be celebrated on 1 June and this day has marked International Children’s Day in China ever since.<\/p>\n Be it during the initial phase of China’s socialist construction, through the heyday of High Maoism in the Cultural Revolution, as part of the educational transformation of the country during the Reform era, in the post-June 1989 indoctrination campaigns, or as part of the consumerist frenzy of recent decades, China’s children have been and remain on the front line. Once they were encouraged to report class enemies; today they are still encouraged to keep an eye out for enemy agents, as well as to resist the blandishments of ‘the West’. It is little wonder then that in the past parents with the means to do so withdrew their children from the Party-controlled education system (for example, see Sang Ye,\u00a01949-2009: Sixty Years Out of Range<\/a>, in\u00a0The Rings of Beijing<\/em><\/a>), or that today those with the money send their children to international schools in China, or to be educated overseas.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Over the months,\u00a0New Sinology Jottings<\/a>\u00a0have focussed on\u00a0traditional and revived Chinese calendrical festivals. Today, we mark the significance of International Children’s Day in China by presenting a video work by the Beijing-based artist Andrea Cavazzuti below. (See Andrea’s\u00a0Stories of Regret \u2014 the Zhang Family of Huayin<\/a>, which also features\u00a0the artist’s biography.)<\/p>\n We conclude this audio-visual celebration\u00a0with a translation of one of the best-known essays from late-Qing China, ‘A Pavilion for Sick Plum Trees’ by Gong Zizhen.<\/p>\n We will\u00a0return to the topic of children, horticulture and politics on the 4th of June.<\/p>\n \u2014 Geremie R. Barm\u00e9, Editor, China Heritage<\/i> ***<\/p>\n I started taking photographs in earnest in the late 1970s and continued to do so in China from when I moved there in the early 1980s. In 1994, I began making videos, an artistic format which I particularly liked as I thought it could best reflect my passion for images, literature and music. The videos I made were fairly much in the style of my previous photographic work: filming whatever attracted my attention or whatever I thought I might be able to turn into something interesting. No pre-ordained plot or script, just some happenstance clues and only the vaguest idea of an overall project: China.<\/p>\n When, in 1999, I decided to devote myself to video, I went through the huge amount of footage I had accumulated and was immediately struck by something: without realising it I had quite a collection of material on\u00a0children playing in the streets. Back then kids were everywhere, enjoying unfettered moments outside.<\/p>\n When I was a kid in the 1960s we spent most of our free time playing in the street. There were no grown ups around telling us what to do, or interfering in our games, let alone to play with us. We were left entirely to our own devices, unless we did something that attracted attention and led to a scolding or being chased. Or, if we’d been kicking a soccer ball against a shop window despite repeated warnings and the owner managed to get a hold of our ball to slash it.<\/p>\n China in the 1990s was about the same. I was probably drawn to making all that footage because, although I was now an adult, I felt that I was witnessing scenes from my own childhood. I decided to edit the material into something like a visual poem, though I had no idea how to do it. I worked on it for ages, experimenting with various combinations of images and music until finally, one day, something occurred to me. I realised that I’d filmed scenes that evoked my own experiences (such is the lurking ‘autobiographical impulse’ of so much that we do), but my experiences were surely tainted by my culture, the books I had read and, most of all, by the movies I had watched. So, I thought to myself, why not push this interaction between reality, memory and fiction even further; why not create a melange: East and West, fiction and reality, memory and imagination, the past and the present?<\/p>\n I made a selection of soundtracks from well-known Western movies and combined them with the footage\u00a0I had. Slowly, magically, things started falling into place. A vision, part reality, part imagination, started to take shape: the world of childhood clashing, interwoven or orchestrated with music, a movie of childhood, for adults. After that, the editing progressed smoothly.<\/p>\n My friend Carlo Laurenti saw a rough cut of the material and suggested I introduce it with an apocryphal story about Confucius encountering children during his peripatetic travels.**<\/p>\n This is the genesis of ‘Bambini’, or ‘Fictional Kids’:<\/p>\n\n
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\n1st June 2017, International Children\u2019s Day
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Fictional Kids<\/strong>
\n a\u00a0video by Andrea Cavazzuti*<\/strong><\/h2>\n