Demystifying the Young Martyrs: Representations of Heroic Children in the Chinese Patriotic Education Campaign (1980s-1990s)

In the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party initiated a propagandistic Patriotic Education Campaign to bolster nationalist sentiments among China's younger generations and maintain the regime's legitimacy. This campaign incorporated various representations of heroes and enemies within textbooks and media products with “didactic functions.”This paper examines the representations of two prominent young heroic martyrs from the campaign: Wang Erxiao and Xiao Luobotou. Both figures have been recurring elements in Chinese communist propaganda since the early years of the People's Republic of China and are widely recognized throughout the country.
The research corpus comprises two sets of Chinese Literacy textbooks published between 1984 and 1999 and an animated series titled “Heroic Children in History.” By employing multimodal and critical discourse analysis, this paper argues that both Wang Erxiao and Xiao Luobotou serve as lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989) to cultivate an idealized collective memory among Chinese youth, thus legitimizing the communist regime.Wang Erxiao, celebrated as an anti-Japanese hero, is depicted as a role model for Chinese children, encouraging them to defend their country against foreign invasion, particularly during the peak of anti-Japanese sentiments in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, Xiao Luobotou symbolizes the anti-Kuomintang struggle, emphasizing his resistance against Kuomintang “counter-revolutionaries” and his quest for freedom in the face of extreme conditions, during a period of tension between the communist and Kuomintang regimes across the Taiwan Strait.

Reference
Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, 26, 7-24.