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In 1974, the Chinese August First Film Studio released the children's film Sparkling Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing). This film not only gained widespread critical acclaim and popularity during the Cultural Revolution, but has also become a household name in contemporary China. Based on the novel of the same title by Li Xintian, Sparkling Red Star features a peasant boy, Pan Dongzi, growing up in the 1930s. Dongzi's father leaves to join the Red Army, and the boy's mother dies in a fire set by the landlord Hu Hansan's militia. With his mother's death, Dongzi is effectively orphaned, and he is taken care of by the masses as represented by the Red Army soldier Wu Xiuzhu and the peasant Grandpa Song. Living with and learning from the masses, Dongzi becomes an active participant and later a capable leader in the class struggle against the enemy, represented by the landlord Hu. Eventually, Dongzi becomes a Red Army soldier, a national hero for every Chinese child to emulate.
The intelligent, courageous, and revolutionary character of Dongzi greatly impressed Chinese viewers, especially children. In a response essay originally published in 1974, a self-identified "teenager" (qing shaonian) named Huang Shuai stated, "I very much admire Dongzi's tactfulness and pluck" (151). A collective essay, "Learn from Pan Dongzi and Become Revolutionary Adventurers," by the Red Guards of the Beijing Xisibei Elementary School appeared in the Beijing Daily of 23 October 1974. The young authors exclaimed, "How great the young Dongzi is!" and called for their peers to adopt his revolutionary spirit. Understanding that "Dongzi is not a flower in the greenhouse but a revolutionary bud, a brave eaglet" (150), the enthralled young viewers also saw themselves in the young revolutionary star: "Like Dongzi's sparkling red star . . . we will grow and temper ourselves in the struggle" (150).1
Ten years after the release of Sparkling Red Star, Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction influentially defined children's literature as "impossible," because it constantly reproduces the fundamental concept, first propounded by Locke and Rousseau, of the child as innocent and pure. For Rose, the child serves adults' desires to stabilize the self through language. Yet it is not hard to see a dissonance between...