Gender writing and the one-child policy in Chinese children's literature, 1993-2018

This thesis offers the first comprehensive study of how the one-child policy shaped gender representation in contemporary Chinese children’s literature during and after its implementation from 1979 to 2015. While the policy’s demographic and sociological effects have been widely examined, its influence on cultural production for children has received far less attention. Situated within children’s literature studies, this research treats gender as a discursive construction and examines how gendered identities are produced through recurring narrative patterns, characterisation, and chronotopic structures. It argues that the one-child policy did not merely condition representations of family size but reorganised the narrative conditions through which childhood, family, futurity, and gender could be imagined. The corpus consists of children’s literature published in mainland China during the one-child policy era and its aftermath. Structured into four chapters, the thesis examines major discourses surrounding the impact of the one-child policy, including the disappearance and reconfiguration of sibling narratives, the emergence of the boyhood crisis, the transformation of family and gender norms in the post-one-child policy period, and the continued marginalisation of rural girls under demographic governance. Across these chapters, it shows how children’s literature mediated policy, market forces, suzhi discourse, and gendered anxieties through specific spatial-temporal arrangements. Although the policy appeared to produce new and experimental temporalities of childhood and family life, these narrative forms ultimately reveal the persistence of deeper patriarchal structures in Chinese culture. The thesis, therefore, contributes to Chinese children’s literature studies, gender studies, and one-child policy scholarship by reframing the one-child policy as a cultural force that shaped not only family structures but also the narrative forms through which childhood and gender were imagined.