About

Margaret Mih Tillman is an Associate Professor of History at Purdue University and is affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts, Asian Studies, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. She holds a PhD from the University of California Berkeley, earned in 2013. Her research focuses on cross-cultural contestations over identity formation and knowledge production in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her monograph, Raising China's Revolutionaries, published by Columbia University Press in 2018, examines the transnational establishment of child welfare as a lens for understanding new sensibilities about childhood innocence and sentimentalization in China. Her current research explores how Chinese youth responded to curricular changes related to academic promotion, with a particular focus on the transnational development of educational psychology and its innovations in testing and contests influenced by wartime experiences. Her work also extends to transnational issues such as diasporic labor in eighteenth-century Cuba and postwar UNESCO. She actively engages in teaching graduate students about the history of twentieth-century China, diasporic China, and global childhood.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Gender studies
• Law
• Archaeology
• Accounting
• Public relations
• Economic history
• Business

Selected publications

• Drawing on Children’s Mobilisation in the Chinese Soviet Republic, 1933–1934

  European Journal of East Asian Studies · 2024-07-18 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract After the White Terror of 1927, the Chinese Communist Party relocated from Shanghai to the border region between Jiangxi and Fujian; one of the major challenges that the new Chinese Soviet Republic faced was transition from urban to rural. While political historians explored the ensuing conflicts between Soviet and Chinese influences, the lens of children’s history indicates that children’s organisations—and children themselves—freely adopted Soviet influences for their own local needs. By examining the visual and textual representation of children and by children in two major periodicals, this article suggests that children participated in the creation of a new political culture and imagination with important legacies for wartime propaganda.

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• The History of Children and Childhood

  2022-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Introduction A central question of the history of childhood is its definition; culturally constructed rather than biologically determined, childhood and youth can encompass a range of gradations of age. “Childhood” is generally defined as a period of preparation for adulthood, through play and schoo

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• Fusion of East and West: Children, Education, and a New China, 1902–1915 By Limin Bai. Oxford: Brill, 2019. 295 pp. €127.00, $153.00 (cloth).

  Journal of Chinese History · 2022-06-24

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• 5 Mediating Modern Motherhood: The Shanghai YWCA’s “Women’s Work for Women,” 1908–1949

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• At Home in the World: Women and Charity in Late Qing and Early Republican China. By Xia Shi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. ix, 274 pp. ISBN: 9780231546232 (cloth).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2020

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  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

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• Measuring Up: Better baby contests in China, 1917–45

  Modern Asian Studies · 2020 · 2 citations

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  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public relations

  Abstract This article charts the Chinese indigenization of better baby contests, from Christian health services offered by the YWCA to positive models of nourishment organized by Chinese philanthropic organizations and local and central governments. American missionaries and milk-powder companies played a large role in sponsoring the contests in China. Influenced by the rise of scientific measurement and ‘national rejuvenation’ as promoted by the New Culture Movement in 1915, Chinese organizers tended to focus on liveliness, gender equality, and statistics that pointed to the need for public reform. As in the United States of America, scientific criteria sometimes also challenged conventional notions of plump cuteness. These goals sometimes conflicted with the implicit aims of corporate sponsors. Contests thus celebrated new material conditions and public hygiene facilitated by modern industry, but was at the same time circumscribed by commercial advertisers, reticent evangelists, or other sponsors.

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• Mediating Modern Motherhood:

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2020-11-30

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• Religious liberty for the Chinese child: missionary debates in the 1930s

  Modern Chinese History · 2019-07-03 · 1 citations

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  In 1931, liberal and conservative Christians debated the possibility of replacing Bible Study with a comparative religions course for elementary-school students, in order to comply with regulations of the Republic of China. Made possible by the ecumenical and indigenization movements within Christianity, this debate intersected with multiple issues: Western accommodation to the rise of Chinese nationalism; Christian resistance to growing secularization in the West, including elements of the social gospel; and clerical responses to child-centered pedagogies. Furthermore, liberals also promoted religious studies as a method for increasing cross-cultural understanding and world peace after World War II. While previous scholars have situated government registration of parochial schools within the rise of Chinese nationalism, this article asserts that missionaries in the 1930s viewed children’s religious education within the framework of both Chinese indigenization and global secularization.

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• D<scp>afna</scp> Z<scp>ur</scp>. <i>Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2019-02-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Benedict Anderson asserted the importance of a shared language for nationalist movements, and recent scholarship on children’s education and literature has shown its particular role in shaping future citizens. What makes Korea an interesting and important case study, as Dafna Zur demonstrates in Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea, is the development of a modern children’s literature in the Korean language in the context of Japanese colonialism. Zur notes that children’s literature best illustrates an imagined future and thus “prompted a particular kind of imagination of past, present, and future at a time when this temporal continuum was reorganized through colonial modernity”—meaning that children’s literature provided early twentieth-century modernizers a specific lens to calibrate what Janet Poole calls colonial Korea’s “crisis of time” (19). Figuring Korean Futures focuses on the way Korean writers responded to psychological and pedagogical inquiries into the so-called “child-heart” (5) or tongsim in Korean (tongxin in Chinese), a term with origins in Confucian philosophy, especially of the Mencian school. Despite the historical dimensions of this term, children’s literature was also inspired by a rejection of traditional Confucian filial piety, and thus it resonates with the roughly contemporaneous Chinese May Fourth Movement. Zur embeds her history in a larger global and regional context, especially with sentimental and scientific influences from Japan, and this book should therefore be of special interest to historians studying the development of child science in East Asia. In the first three chapters of the book, Zur establishes that the child-heart needed to be “knowable” in order to create a literature that described and addressed children. Child experts were “taste-shapers” who influenced the production and development of children’s literature (74).

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• Raising China's Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, 1920s-1950s

  2018-10-02 · 11 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  A widespread conviction in the need to rescue China’s children took hold in the early twentieth century. Amid political upheaval and natural disasters, neglected or abandoned children became a humanitarian focal point for Sino-Western cooperation and intervention in family life. Chinese academics and officials sought new scientific measures, educational institutions, and social reforms to improve children’s welfare. Successive regimes encouraged teachers to shape children into Qing subjects, Nationalist citizens, or Communist comrades.In Raising China’s Revolutionaries, Margaret Mih Tillman offers a novel perspective on the political and scientific dimensions of experiments with early childhood education from the early Republican period through the first decade of the People’s Republic. She traces transnational advocacy for child welfare and education, examining Christian missionaries, philanthropists, and the role of international relief during World War II. Tillman provides in-depth analysis of similarities and differences between Nationalist and Communist policy and cultural notions of childhood. While both Nationalist and Communist regimes drew on preschool institutions to mobilize the workforce and shape children’s political subjectivity, the Communist regime rejected the Nationalists’ commitment to the modern, bourgeois family. With new insights into the roles of experts, the cultural politics of fundraising, and child welfare as a form of international exchange, Raising China’s Revolutionaries is an important work of institutional and transnational history that illuminates the evolution of modern concepts of childhood in China

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Frequent coauthors

• Noah Arlow

  Columbia University

  25 shared

• Margaret Mih

  Columbia University

  25 shared

• Hoyt Cleveland Tillman

  2 shared

• Greg Guyette

  International Space Station

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of California Berkeley

  2013

• BA, English

  University of California Berkeley

  2003

Awards & honors

• American Council of Learned Societies grant
• Taiwan Fulbright grant