Jianhao Xu, Newcastle University. This blog accompanies Xu’s forthcoming article in Cultural and Social History. 

The historical context examined in this study is the profound social and political crisis experienced by China in the 1930s under the sustained pressure of Japanese aggression. Since the September 18 Incident, Japan’s military expansion in China had intensified continuously, and national survival became a central issue in public discourse. Against this backdrop, Chinese newspapers and periodicals frequently reported cases of youth suicide, often linking these individual tragedies to future of the nation, educational problems and the economic crisis. In doing so, the media helped shape a public emotional atmosphere permeated by melancholy, anxiety, and unease.

In response to the increasingly prominent problem of youth suicide, the Chinese Nationalist Government began to intervene through legal measures and public discourse, emphasizing the social responsibility and moral value of life and explicitly opposing the romanticization or justification of suicide. However, because political power under the Nationalist regime was not fully centralized at the time, the media sphere was not monopolized by a single official narrative. As a result, newspapers and journals continued to present diverse and often tension-filled voices surrounding the issue of youth suicide.

Drawing on newspapers, periodicals, and youth-submitted writings from the 1930s, this study examines media debates, state intervention, and young people’s own emotional responses to youth suicide. Rather than focusing on the causes of suicidal behavior itself, I am concerned with how suicide was interpreted, regulated, and contested in public discourse, and how young people expressed, adjusted, or suppressed their emotional judgments in this process.

In previous scholarship on the history of childhood culture in China, researchers have paid greater attention to works produced by adults for children and adolescents, while seldom treating children’s and adolescents’ own writings as valid objects of analysis. This research orientation is partly attributable to the limitations of historical sources: during the Republican period, China was marked by prolonged war and social instability, and relatively few writings by children and adolescents have survived. Such an approach has perhaps inadvertently constrained our insights into how young people made sense of social crises and expressed their emotional and moral judgments. My study seeks to address this gap by analyzing youths’ writings in 1930s periodicals that responded to the suicides of their peers, exploring how young people formed their own emotional expression under the combined influence of media discourse, state intervention, and broader social emotional climates.

Departing from existing studies, which have primarily focused on youths’ writings in isolation, this article examines them in conjunction with reading history. I find that young people at the time did not limit their reading to publications explicitly labeled as “youth” or “children’s” reading materials. Instead, they widely consumed adult newspapers and journals, and actively engaged in public debates within the adult world. After reading these adult publications, young people formed and articulated emotional judgments about social events based on their own political positions and experiences.

In fact, adult publications in the 1930s did not present a unified stance on youth suicide. Some periodicals responded to government calls by treating suicide reports as warnings for schools and society. In Figure 1, in some of the publications at that time, these suicidal students were depicted as lazy students who were obsessed with romance. They failed the exams due to laziness and eventually chose to commit suicide because of melancholy. Obviously, this is intended to warn teenagers not to commit suicide. However, others used cases of youth suicide to criticize the Nationalist Government’s conciliatory policies in the face of Japanese aggression, portraying young people as driven to despair under political oppression. It was within these competing narratives that young people developed their understandings of suicide and their emotional responses to it, producing a historical landscape marked by multiple tensions. Accordingly, this study adopts a methodology centered on 1930s periodical materials, placing youth writings, adult media reports, and state legal texts in dialogue with one another. The greatest challenges in this research lie in the highly fragmented nature of the sources and the complexity of the narratives themselves.

This study offers two key insights for the histories of children’s culture and emotions. First, it underscores the importance of taking “silence” seriously in research on the histories of children and adolescents. On the highly moralized and politicized issue of suicide, youth writings rarely contained voices that openly supported suicide. Previous scholarship has often treated this absence either as a result of insufficient sources or as evidence of social consensus. This study argues instead that such silence should itself be understood as a historical phenomenon requiring explanation. Through an analysis of the legal regulations and publication censorship policies introduced by the Nationalist government in the 1930s to curb youth suicide, this article suggests that youths’ “silence” on suicide was likely the result of the combined effects of institutional constraints and moral discipline. This finding helps illuminate how emotions became objects of state governance and how the public boundaries of emotional expression were constructed.

Second, this study identifies youth subjectivity and agency within that very silence. Although young people did not express emotions under conditions of complete freedom, their responses to their peers’ suicides were far from uniform. Some youths adopted nationalist and collectivist positions, arguing that suicide was harmful to China amid a national crisis and portraying suicidal peers as lazy, undisciplined, and unpatriotic. Such writings, to some extent, echoed the Nationalist government’s anti-suicide propaganda. At the same time, many young people dared to express sympathy for their suicidal peers and, within a social atmosphere saturated with suicide discourse, articulated feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety about the future. These tension-filled responses demonstrate that young people were not merely passive recipients of state discipline, but active participants in negotiating moral meanings and emotional values within institutional constraints.

At the theoretical level, this study draws on and extends Barbara H. Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities.” It shows that although emotional expressions among youths in the 1930s were highly diverse, clear boundaries existed regarding whether one could publicly support suicide or express melancholic emotions. These boundaries were not natural or self-evident, but were jointly shaped by specific political cultures and institutional constraints. Accordingly, this article argues that youth suicide in Republican China should not be understood simply as a social or psychological problem, but rather as a complex product of the interplay among media discourse, state power, and emotional communities.