Artistic Analysis: The Deficiency of Literary Value in The Selected Corpus of Yang Hongying’s Works

Driven by rising social productivity and electronic media development, commercial children’s literature has spawned the “Yang Hongying Phenomenon”, featured by huge divergence between market popularity and academic criticism. Publishers and readers praise Yang Hongying’s works for catering to children’s reading demands, while literary critics argue her creations suffer from weak literariness, colloquial narration and superficial thematic expression. Yang Hongying defends her writing relying on sales data, yet market success and literary quality are two independent evaluation dimensions, and sales volume cannot prove superior textual aesthetics. Though her creation claims to follow child-centred theory, Yang Hongying’s texts indulge in cultural pandering to children, simplifying adult-child relations into a rigid binary opposition of “innocent children and flawed adults”. Quantitative analysis of The Transfer Student Named Niupi shows unequal physical depictions between boy and girl characters, which strips girl figures of textual subjectivity. Drawing on Halliday’s transitivity theory to analyse Tomboy Dai An, this study finds that female characters are mostly trapped in passive responses; even the tomboy Dai An obtains narrative agency only via de-feminised, violent masculine behaviours. Works like Girls’ Diary and Boys’ Diary further consolidate rigid gender stereotypes and binary gender divisions. While Yang Hongying’s efforts to diversify characters are worthy of recognition, some of her works are restricted by shallow narrative skills, one-sided child-centred narration and fixed gender frameworks, lacking profound artistic value and sound gender enlightenment for young readers.