Description
This paper examines how contemporary Chinese children’s literature represents internal migrant families under the shifting policy regimes and social-spatial transformations. Drawing on the monthly magazine Er Tong Wen Xue (Children’s Literature) as corpus and combining Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space and the “right to the city” with Edward Relph’s notions of insideness and outsideness and Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia, the paper analyzes how migration restructures domestic and social space and reshapes identities.In stories about left-behind children, parental absence redistributes domestic labour, and the home becomes a place where children take over adult responsibilities while trying to rebuild the affective domestic space through objects, animals, and festival rituals. For floating families, children are facing the “non-urban” label and classroom discrimination. They are between rural authenticity and pressured urban conformity. “Migrant-bird” texts further foreground rootlessness, depicting children who oscillate between urban and rural without fully belonging to either, while newer works write both state interventions (community centers, poverty alleviation resettlements) and a growing nostalgia for rural environments and sociality.
This study, therefore, demonstrates how migrant families are reflected in Children’s literature and critiques China’s dual urban-rural system. And showing the gradual development of how migrant families from passive sufferers of displacement into active agents who claim affective, spatial, and ethical rights to the city and to “home.”
| Period | 29 May 2025 → 1 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Annual Meeting of American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2025 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |