It should provide some hope, though, that Chinese officials have done something without meaning to.
THE THESIS — PHILIP HENSHER, UNHERD
This fall, China made Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre compulsory reading for 14- and 15-year-olds across the country. Writing in UnHerd, the novelist Philip Hensher notes the official reasoning, as reported in the Party-backed press: “the innocent, budding stage of first love is a crucial period for shaping a well-rounded personality.”
Hensher thinks Beijing has assigned more than a love story. Jane is the orphan who tells her cruel aunt that “the very thought of you makes me sick,” and she grows into a woman who answers to her own conscience rather than to the man with power over her. Those are dangerous lessons, he suggests, to hand every teenager in a country that ranks 178th of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index.
His conclusion is hopeful. A state that assigns a book about speaking the truth may be teaching it.
The reporting tells a different story. China has had Jane Eyre for a century. A Chinese translation appeared in 1925, and a 1979 British film adaptation played in Chinese theaters as the country reopened after the Cultural Revolution (New York Times). Generations have read it, and the system has stood.
The choice also looks deliberate. Beijing Daily pitched the novel as a counterweight to social media’s “superficial notions about appearance and wealth” (CNN). UC San Diego scholar Ping Zhu told the Times that Jane is “an independent woman, but she’s not too outrageous in her challenge of patriarchal power.” She ends the book married and a mother, which fits a government urging young people to start families.
On this view, Beijing didn’t assign a rebel by accident. It chose a heroine whose independence ends in a home.
Both sides are reading the same novel and stopping at different chapters. Beijing assigned Jane Eyre for its ending: the marriage, the home, love that money can’t buy. Hensher is betting on its beginning: the child who talks back and the young woman who walks away from Thornfield with nothing rather than betray herself.
Notice what the two arguments share. Each assumes a book does what its readers are told it does. A ministry can set the exam question, but not the moment a 15-year-old reaches Jane’s declaration, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” A novel doesn’t topple a government. It builds an inner life, and inner lives are the one thing no curriculum fully controls.
There is something worth admiring in the choice itself. A nation that wants its teenagers to value character over wealth reached for a Victorian Englishwoman’s conscience, and trusted 14-year-olds with it. Whatever Beijing intends, it has given millions of young readers a heroine who insists on choosing for herself.
Can a government assign a book without assigning what it means?
