Babies in Q City (Q Cheng Baobei), a cartoon book designed for children's early education by a former school teacher, was published recently in Shenzhen.

Meanwhile, a cartoon drama under the same title is now showing on the Shenzhen TV Children Channel.

With 1,000 episodes, the drama is believed to be one of the longest of its kind in the nation, focusing on education for young children.

The book's author, Jia Aihua, hopes that the book will benefit from the drama's popularity and be a hit on the market.

The Haitian Publishing House, the book's publisher, is famous for publishing many best-selling children's books.

So far it has published 30,000 copies of the book's first 60 parts.

According to the publishing company, all the book's series will be published by the end of this year.

The author started writing the book seven years ago when she saw that her son really enjoyed watching cartoons on television.

"It took a long time for me to finish the book since I was always thinking about what is the best way to teach children of an early age," Jia said.

Jia used to be a teacher and then worked in a foreign-funded company based in Guangzhou.

Last year, she quit her job to set up her own work studio, called "Beibei Creation Studio."

"I tried to improve the book's content to make it very readable for children when I set up my own work studio," Jia said in an interview with China Daily.

The book, featuring how to develop children's knowledge about the outside world and form good habits in their daily lives, tells lots of fairy tales of 168 children in the cartoon world.

Being a former teacher and a mother of a 7-year-old boy, Jia has learned a lot about how to communicate with children.

"After I found that most children like to do what they learn from cartoon movies or books rather than what their parents teach them, I started to write the book," Jia said.

Experts are now calling for more authentic and original cartoon products for children, following the publication of the book.

"Most children are keen on cartoon movies and books developed in foreign countries, and they are not therefore learning about what happens around the nation," said Fu Tiezheng, an official with the China National Television and Arts Association.

Fu said China has seen a decline in the development of original cartoon products in recent years.

"Cartoon products, such as movies or books, should target different groups of people, and Jia's book is a good example that has been specially designed for children under 7 years old," Fu said.

(China Daily January 23, 2006)