The King of Children by Ah Cheng

Mao’s Cultural Revolution was an attempt to create a new culture for China. Through education reforms and readjustments, Mao hoped to create a new generation of Chinese people - a generation of mindless Communists. By eliminating intellectuals via the Down to the Countryside movement, Mao hoped to eliminate elements of traditional Chinese culture and create a new form Chinese culture. He knew that dumbing down the masses would give him more power so his regime would be more stable. This dramatic reform affected youth especially as they were targeted by Mao’s propaganda and influence. Drawing from his experiences as an Educated Youth who was sent down to the countryside Down to the Countryside movement, Ah Cheng wrote The King of Children to show the effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, and how they affected the meaning people found in education. In The King of Children, it is shown that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the traditional incentives for pursuing an education, and instead people found moral and ethical meaning in pursuing an education.
The Cultural Revolution, especially the Down to the Countryside movement, effectively eliminated any economic and practical incentive to get an education. The narrator, Beanpole, illustrates this quite clearly through his experiences. Despite being “the only one among the Educated Youths in the whole branch farm who has actually finished his secondary education” (128), there is no indication in the entire story that Beanpole will use his education for any meaningful purpose other than to teach. In fact, from the very first sentence, Beanpole states what he has spent the past seven years doing with his education: “working in the countryside” (123). He then proceeds ...

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...s that he views learning propaganda as useless, while his efforts to get his students’ writings to be “legible and comprehensible” (157) indicate that he views literacy as practical and thus focuses his efforts on teaching his students to be literate.
Through the characters and their experiences in The King of Children, Ah Cheng shows the effects that the Cultural Revolution had on education and how that affected the people’s search for personal meaning in education. The Cultural Revolution and Down to the Countryside’s elimination of all practical and economic incentives for receiving an education caused characters to find moral and ethical incentives for education, such as to protect others and to be able to communicate effectively.

Works Cited

Cheng, Ah. The King of Trees. Trans. Bonnie S. McDougall. New York: New Directions, 2010. Print.