Isabella Jackson is Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin, where she was the Principal Investigator of the Irish Research Council Laureate Award ‘CHINACHILD: “Slave-Girls” and the Discovery of Female Childhood in Twentieth-Century China’ (2018-2024).Yushu Geng is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, having previously been a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU Shanghai and an Irish Research Council research fellow on the CHINACHILD project.

• 1. Introduction: Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History Part 1: Chinese childhood in a global context 2. The Road to Adaptation: The Boy Scout Movement and the Making of Youth Culture in Shanghai, 1912–1919 3. Black Hair, Black Eyes: The Child as Universal Subject in Civil War China, 1946-1949 Part 2: Children in the family and the state 4. National Necessity or Privileged Commodity: Chinese Childcare Centres of the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937 5. Advertising Girlhood and Womanhood in Republican Shanghai: Between Family Prosperity and the Fate of the Nation 6. Cultivating of the ‘Whole Child’ among Chinese Christian Elite Girls: Nationalist and Communist Visions of Childhood Part 3: Education and scientific authority 7. Reconceptualising Nüxue (Female Learning and Education): Xu Jiaxing’s Self-Cultivation Textbook for Girls (1906) 8. Science in the Toy Box: Leisure and the Domestication of Technology in the Republican and Mao Eras Part 4: Children’s Voices 9. ‘My Father Sold me as a Maid’: When binü (婢女, ‘maidservants’ or ‘slave-girls’) spoke up in Republican China 10. ‘At the Centre of a Tornado’: Missionary schoolgirls’ experiences of the Second Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai 11. Children at the Margins: Rethinking anthropological perspectives about mid-twentieth century Chinese childhoods