Chinese Children’s Books Regulations

My last blog post I talked about how extremely limited children’s books are in North Korea, and I wanted to touch on a similar arising topic that is now happening in China. As many know, China is a very large country, with nearly 220 million people alone that are under the age of 14. This provides a gigantic market for children’s books and for publishers to try and get to. The issue is now China wants to limit how many children’s books come from foreign countries. This is sort of similar to North Korea and how North Korea doesn’t even allow books that don’t come from in house publishers to be released and read by citizens. While China isn’t that extreme yet, they are now taking approaches to become more similar to that and to limit what kind of content is making it into their country. The large reasoning for this is also like North Korea’s, they want to limit the inflow of ideology of other countries. This is primarily targeted at western countries like the United States. Chinese government has decided that they don’t want to instill American beliefs and customs that could potentially exist in books written by American authors into their children and have the impacts that could potentially arise from that. I found this interesting because we talked a lot during the semester about so many different stories and the potential impacts it could have on kids reading them, and I never really thought about how it could also impact people of different countries to read about other cultures books and for it to potentially change their minds on their own culture. I understood how some of the books we read were there to talk about the differences in cultures and to open eyes such as American Born Chinese, but it was still surprising to me to see that countries as large as China would still be getting strict and tightening the restrictions on the content they are going to allow into their country and for their young population to read simply because it was written in a different country with some potentially differing beliefs and ideals.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/13/peppa-pig-pulled-china-cracks-down-on-foreign-childrens-books