‘Frustration is boiling over in the nascent Chinese manosphere.’ (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty) ‘Frustration is boiling over in the nascent Chinese manosphere.’ (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty) Chinese middle schoolers have had to get their heads around some new reading material this year. Following a once-a-decade reshuffle of the literature syllabus, China’s ninth graders are going back to school with new books. In addition to Three Hundred Tang Poems (a canonical anthology of medieval verse), Red Crag (a realist novel set during China’s civil war), and Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques (a 19th-century treatise on bugs authored by an anti-Darwinian Frenchman), the most striking addition to the curriculum is that landmark of Gothic romance, Jane Eyre . It’s not immediately clear why Beijing has given Charlotte Brontë’s classic such prominence in the classroom. Thankfully, the West’s top China watchers are on the case. If you’ve read the spate of recent articles from Western media outlets concerning Jane Eyre in China — articles in which there’s been much white-knuckled pearl clutching over China’s “compulsory curriculum” ( The Times ) , “mandatory reading list” ( CNN ), and other histrionic synonyms for, well, a middle-school syllabus — you’ll find one explanation repeated ad nauseaum . The Ministry for Education has, so we’re told, assigned the didactic, pro-family Jane Eyre as a last-ditch effort to reverse China’s precipitous population decline. As the Economist puts it: “The independent-minded heroine, Ms Eyre, who rejects two proposals before ultimately marrying and bearing a son, has a thing or two to teach young Chinese, the Communist Party thinks.” To be sure, Chinese officials are wary of the looming demographic crisis. As of this year, marriages have hit a decade-long low ; birth rates an all-time low ; and China expects a population decline of 250 million by 2050. But even if the nomenklatura did imagine that a 19th-century English novel was the way to win young Chinese hearts and minds to baby-making, Jane Eyre would be a strange choice. For one, the novel just doesn’t really seem to care about Jane’s maternity; Jane’s son, whom Brontë never bothers to name, exists by virtue of a single subordinate clause tossed off in the middle of the book. Our author devotes twice as many words to describing the embroidered chaises of Thornfield Hall as she does to Rochester Junior. Second, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice enjoy similarly storied literary reputations in China; and the orphaned children, Christian ascetics, and wife in the attic that make Brontë’s novel such an unlikely candidate for the transmission of stolid family values are conspicuously absent in the other two novels. If the Ministry for Education really wanted to assign a conservative-minded English classic, why wouldn’t they have gone with Jane’s more presentable cousins? When one turns from CNN to the Chinese sources, however, a much clearer picture emerges of Jane Eyre ’s actual purpose in the classroom. Anyone expecting Brontë to be filtered through dense layers of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and Xi Jinping Thought, however, will be sorely disappointed. According to the Beijing Daily article which announced the updated curriculum , the novel will be taught in a course module on “Maturity”, which takes a fairly orthodox view on Jane Eyre ’s key themes: “[Jane Eyre] recognised that love ought to be founded upon the basis of spiritual equality, rather than wealth, social status, or outward appearance.” For the Chinese government, then, the point of teaching Jane Eyre isn’t to promote biological reproduction, but true love. I realise that, at first pass, the notion of faceless Communist Party bureaucrats spreading romantic ideals among the youth sounds absurd. However, Beijing’s pedagogical intervention makes perfect sense when seen against the backdrop of the gender wars raging everywhere in contemporary Chinese society. Like pretty much
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