Raising China's Revolutionaries

Margaret Mih Tillman offers a novel perspective on the political and scientific dimensions of experiments with early childhood education. Raising China’s Revolutionaries is an important work of institutional and transnational history that illuminates the evolution of modern concepts of childhood in twentieth-century China.

Tillman Margaret Mih :

Margaret Tillman is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. She has published articles in the Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, New Frontiers in Chinese History, Cross-Currents, and Oriens Extremus, among other publications.Margaret Mih Tillman is assistant professor of history at Purdue University.

Ying-shih Yu, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, co-winner of the John W. Kluge Prize and the inaugural winner of the Tang Prize:
Since the late Qing there had been a general belief among Chinese revolutionaries and reformers that China’s modernization must begin with the construction of a modern childhood. As a result, a great variety of ideas and institutions were proposed and developed in the realm of child education from the 1930s to the 1950s. This book, Raising China’s Revolutionaries, is a rigorous and vivid account of this important historical development based on the author’s comprehensive and penetrating study of the numerous archival and other primary sources as well as her personal experiences as a visiting preschooler in the Chinese system.

Thomas O. Höllmann, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich:
Informative, instructive, inspiring. Margaret Mih Tillman's book is an important contribution to the research of childhood socialization in modern China.

Robert Culp, Bard College:
Margaret Tillman has written an excellent book. Raising China's Revolutionaries demonstrates how policies regarding childcare and child welfare were central to the formation of the modern Chinese state, and suggests how the mobilization and deployment of aid and care facilitated elite professionalization and formation of a range of social institutions that had lasting relevance. The book promises to intervene with great impact in a number of different historiographical debates in the China field and global history more broadly.