ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Zhao Yuanren's translation constructs a modern child that came to embody the May Fourth imagination of an ideal modern Chinese citizen, a child that both originates and deviates from Carroll's Alice. In order to better understand the important role Zhao's translation played in the May Fourth nation-building project, the entangled relationship between the construction of the modern child and the modern Chinese nation needs first to be traced back to late Qing, when the door of the thousand-year-old Chinese empire was forced open by foreign guns and cannons. The ideal Chinese national character came to conflate with an ideal modern Chinese childhood supposedly possessing those "innate" positive potentials, and the key to the national rise lay in the education of children. The concept of the Chinese national character continued to be a major discourse during the period and was effectively incorporated into the May Fourth movement.
