Abstract:

The Chinese market for children’s picture books has seen phenomenal change over the past decade.
Boasting a stable group of potential readers and healthy organic growth in market share, foreign children’s picture
books – especially ones imported from Europe and America – became many Chinese parents’ priority, rendering
their domestic counterparts subordinate. This paper explores children’s picture books published in the United
States from a gender perspective. Employing measures of content and text analysis, we especially compare and
contrast the variables such as frequency of male and female characters, character setting and personality cultivation
in American picture books in an effort to develop an internationalized vision and strategy for the development of
domestic children’s books.