Bringing crisis closer: spatial zoom-in narrative and the construction of children’s agency in original Chinese climate-themed picturebooks

Against the backdrop of an intensifying global climate crisis, original Chinese climate-themed picturebooks do not simply portray children as passive victims or as symbolic figures of a distant future. Rather, through different strategies of spatial narration, they reorganize the relationship between children and ecological crisis. Focusing on three original picturebooks—Hu Xiaoli and Gao Bei’s Polar Bear’s Dream , Li Kangyan, Cheng Beibei, and Zhang Wenshan’s The Warming Planet , and Liu Xugong’s Look at You, Making Such a Mess! —this article examines how the climate crisis is transformed in children’s picturebooks into an experiential space that can be seen, understood, and responded to. The order of discussion does not follow the chronology of publication, nor does it seek to construct a linear developmental history of original Chinese climate-themed picturebooks. Instead, the article offers a typological analysis based on the different spatial scales and positions of children’s agency presented in the three works. Polar Bear’s Dream constructs children as ecological witnesses through a distant polar space; The Warming Planet presents children as learners of climate knowledge through the space of a global journey; and Look at You, Making Such a Mess! Situates children as everyday ecological actors through movements across the home, the neighborhood, and the public environment. This article conceptualizes this narrative mechanism as a “spatial zoom-in narrative”: a mode of narration that reorganizes geographical scale, emotional distance, and the possibility of action, thereby transforming an abstract, distant, and difficult-to-grasp climate crisis into a proximate experience that children can perceive and respond to. At the same time, the article argues that while this strategy opens up forms of children’s agency, it may also simplify complex systemic responsibilities into individualized action, producing an internal tension between the empowerment of children’s action and the shifting of responsibility onto children. In this sense, the article approaches original Chinese climate-themed picturebooks from the perspective of spatial narration and offers a possible analytical lens for understanding the construction of children’s agency in the context of the climate crisis.