LiaoвЂ™s statement foregrounds the many different roles adults have envisioned for the child in modern China. We will take the children back to seventy years ago, which was a period of terror, and witness how the children of that era used their weak shoulders, youthful blood, and young lives to shoulder the great cause of the War of Resistance, encouraging the present generation of children to cherish their happy lives and to reflect on how they, too, can contribute to a rich, strong, and prosperous nation. Watching Red Tassel is a means to traverse time. In the words of the playвЂ™s director, Liao Xiaohong: The adaptation of this вЂњred classicвЂќ tale into a childrenвЂ™s play was aimed at using the memory of persecution and heroism to instill a sense of patriotic duty in the younger generation who have grown up in the postrevolutionary present. Red Tassel retells the famous and, in all likelihood, apocryphal story of the young martyr Wang Erxiao зЋ‹дєЊе°Џ, a thirteen-year-old cowherd who sacrificed his life in 1942 to protect his fellow villagers and Communist troops from marauding Japanese soldiers (figure 1). In 2015, a childrenвЂ™s play called Red Tassel ( Hongying зґ…зє“) was performed to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937вЂ“1945). Imagining the New Socialist Child: The Cultural Afterlife of the Child Martyr Wang Erxiao Keywords: child martyrdom, Wang Erxiao, War of Resistance against Japan, socialist literature, Boy Scouts, Alain Badiou By examining the relationship between children, violence, and sacrificial death, this article highlights the desires and anxieties embedded within the socialist project to create an image of the вЂњnew child.вЂќ On the other hand, in lionizing the heroic death of the child-the so-called revolutionary successor-stories like Wang ErxiaoвЂ™s also posed an existential threat to the socialist community and brought to the fore tensions intrinsic to politicizing and aestheticizing the death of a child. The author argues that, on the one hand, the figure of the socialist child martyr embodied the desire for the child to play a more active role in the Communist revolution and in the creation of a socialist utopia. By exploring the cultural afterlife of the socialist martyr Wang Erxiao in mid-twentieth-century China, this article shows how the heroic sacrificial death of the boy both powered and imperiled the Communist-led revolution and the construction of a new, socialist society. Yet very few studies have focused on the motif of child martyrdom and its place within Chinese socialist culture. Recent scholarship in modern Chinese studies has established the centrality of the figure of the child in modern configurations of nationhood.

Feng xing hero national hero