Anji Play: Love, Risk, Joy, Engagement, and Reflection in the Research Literature

Anji Play is a public early-childhood curriculum developed by educator Cheng Xueqin in the kindergartens of Anji County, Zhejiang Province, China. It organizes the preschool day around long periods of self-determined outdoor play with large, open-ended materials—including genuinely risky climbing and building—followed by child-led reflection on documented play. In two decades it has grown from a county reform into a national and international reference point for play-based education delivered at public scale. This review traces the approach's origins in China's kindergarten reform movement and weighs the research evidence bearing on its core commitments: self-directed play, loose-parts materials, physical risk, and structured reflection. The supporting literatures are substantial but uneven—robust for play and risk in general, thin for loose parts specifically—and direct studies of Anji Play, though encouraging, remain small, short-term, and without longitudinal outcome data. Practical implications for families and educators are discussed.

In the late 1990s, Cheng Xueqin, the educator responsible for pre-primary education in the public school system of Anji County—a rural, bamboo-growing county in Zhejiang Province, China, roughly three hours from Shanghai—began to question what her kindergartens were calling play. By the account she and her collaborators have given, the county's programs had already passed through one transformation: an earlier era in which young children largely sat at desks with little or no play had given way, under national reform pressure, to classrooms in which play appeared on the schedule. But the play that appeared was scripted, demonstrated, and managed by adults. Cheng came to call this condition "false play": activity that looked playful to observers while stripping from children the choice, absorption, and joy that make play worth the name (Coffino & Bailey, 2019; Anji Education, n.d.-a). Beginning in the early 2000s, she led the county's public kindergartens through a second, more radical transformation, removing teacher-directed performances and rebuilding the day around what she named "True Play": long, daily, uninterrupted periods of self-determined activity in which children decide what to play, where, how, and with whom, using large open-ended materials, while teachers watch closely and intervene only rarely.

The reform did not arise in a vacuum. China ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with its recognition of the child's right to play, and the national kindergarten regulations of 1996 formally designated play a basic activity of kindergarten education—commitments elaborated in the curriculum guidelines of 2001 that anchored a two-decade movement away from the drilled, teacher-centered early classrooms of the past (Zhu & Zhang, 2008). Zhu and Zhang describe the Chinese early-childhood system those reforms addressed as a layered hybrid of traditional, communist, and Western influences, in which imported child-centered ideals have repeatedly collided with deep-rooted expectations of discipline and academic preparation. Comparative ethnography from the same period documented Chinese preschools negotiating exactly this tension between directive instructional traditions and imported child-centered ideals (Tobin, Hsueh, & Karasawa, 2009). Anji Play is best understood, then, not as an exotic outlier but as an unusually thorough implementation—across an entire county's public system—of commitments that Chinese policy had already endorsed on paper and that most systems worldwide honor more in rhetoric than in practice.

Over roughly twenty years of iteration, Cheng and her colleagues distilled the approach into five principles: Love, Risk, Joy, Engagement, and Reflection (Coffino & Bailey, 2019). In 2014, the organization reports, Cheng received China's top national honor for early-childhood education, and the translator Jesse Robert Coffino joined her that year to carry the work beyond China (Coffino & Bailey, 2019; Anji Education, n.d.-a). Today the approach remains the full-day curriculum of about 130 public kindergartens and village teaching sites serving roughly 14,000 children ages three to six in Anji County; the organization states that it is practiced in public early-childhood programs across all of China's 34 provinces and administrative regions, and the Finnish education nonprofit HundrED, which selected Anji Play for its global collection, reported the approach operating in four countries and reaching on the order of 100,000 learners as of 2024, with pilot programs in the United States, Europe, and Africa (Anji Education, n.d.-a; HundrED, n.d.).

Inside a True Play kindergarten

The material culture of an Anji kindergarten is distinctive and deliberately spare. In place of commercial toys, children play with robust, body-scale materials—bamboo and wooden ladders, planks, blocks, barrels, ropes, carts, mats, and climbing cubes, many of them designed and fabricated locally—which they combine into ramps, towers, bridges, and obstacle courses of their own invention (Coffino & Bailey, 2019). Play is predominantly outdoors, in yards intentionally landscaped with varied terrain, and it is self-determined in a strong sense: children choose their materials, companions, projects, and level of physical challenge, and teachers do not assign, model, or steer the activity. The design and use of these outdoor environments have themselves become objects of scholarly attention; an ethnographic chapter by Meng and He (2021), using photo observation, anecdotal records, and interviews, analyzed how outdoor space is designed and used in a kindergarten in Anji alongside one in Bergen, Norway, placing the Chinese county's practice in dialogue with the Nordic outdoor-play tradition to which it is often compared.

What most distinguishes Anji Play from a simple return to free play, however, is what happens around the play. Teachers act as close observers and documentarians, photographing and video-recording play rather than directing it; later the same day, children revisit that documentation in group discussion and draw and narrate "play stories," translating self-directed action into representation, vocabulary, and shared reflection (Coffino & Bailey, 2019). Scholars have noted that this cycle gives the approach an intellectual structure that casual observers of the climbing and shrieking can miss. Moffett (2021), writing in Studies in Art Education, reads Anji Play as a rethinking of the relations among art, play, and pedagogy—an approach that declines to subordinate children's play to adult instructional ends while remaining, in his analysis, distinctly Chinese rather than a copy of Western progressive models.

The developmental case for self-determined play

The broadest scientific warrant for Anji Play's central bet comes from the general literature on child-directed play. The American Academy of Pediatrics' clinical report on play concluded that developmentally appropriate play with peers and caregivers is a singular opportunity to build executive function, language, early mathematical thinking, social-emotional skill, and safe, stable relationships, and it urged pediatricians to actively protect play against curricular encroachment (Yogman, Garner, Hutchinson, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2018). That report also reflects the field's honest complexity: much of the evidence connecting play to specific outcomes is correlational, and an active research debate contrasts fully free play with "guided play," in which adults gently scaffold toward learning goals—a format many experimental studies favor for targeted academic skills. Anji Play takes a more radical position than most Western play advocates: during play itself, adults neither guide nor redirect. Its wager is that self-determination during play, followed by adult-supported reflection after play, captures the benefits of both freedom and scaffolding. That precise sequencing has not been tested against guided-play alternatives in controlled research, and it should be named as the approach's most interesting open empirical question.

A widely cited evidence review commissioned by the LEGO Foundation offers a useful vocabulary for locating Anji Play on this map. Zosh and colleagues (2017), synthesizing developmental and neuroscientific research, situate children's learning experiences along a spectrum running from free play through guided play toward games and direct instruction, and characterize genuinely playful learning as joyful, meaningful, actively engaging, iterative, and socially interactive. The resemblance between that research-derived list and Anji Play's five principles is striking, and apparently convergent rather than derivative: Cheng's principles were distilled from two decades of practice in a rural county, not from the Western literature. On the spectrum itself, Anji Play occupies an unusual position—its play periods sit at the free-play extreme, while its daily reflection meetings introduce adult scaffolding only after the play has ended—which is exactly why it cannot be simply filed on either side of the free-versus-guided debate.

Loose parts at body scale

Anji Play's materials descend, intellectually, from the theory of loose parts articulated by the architect Simon Nicholson (1971), who argued that inventiveness, creativity, and the possibility of discovery in any environment are directly proportional to the number and kinds of variables in it—and that children are systematically cheated when adults pre-form their environments into fixed, single-purpose equipment. The ladders, planks, and barrels of Anji County are loose parts scaled up to the whole body, and the county's system is arguably the largest sustained field test of Nicholson's idea anywhere in the world.

The honest state of the loose-parts evidence, however, counsels modesty. Gibson, Cornell, and Gill (2017), in a systematic review of loose-parts play interventions for school-aged children, located only five studies with quantitative cognitive, social, or emotional outcome measures—two of them randomized controlled trials—and concluded that the evidence base was insufficient to determine whether such interventions affect cognitive, social, or emotional development, even while noting that benefits for physical activity are better established in prior meta-analytic work. In other words, the theory is elegant and the observational literature is rich, but the controlled-outcome research on loose parts specifically is thin. Anji Play's practice is consistent with the loose-parts tradition; it cannot yet borrow strong causal claims from it.

Risk as a principle, not an accident

Perhaps the most startling feature of Anji Play for first-time visitors—and the one that has traveled farthest in international discussion—is that Risk is named as one of its five principles. Children climb high, balance on stacked and self-built structures, swing, roll, and descend slopes at speed, and teachers are trained to watch rather than to preempt. Here the approach aligns with a maturing research literature. Sandseter and Kennair (2011) advanced an evolutionary account in which risky play serves an anti-phobic function: through thrilling, fear-edged experiences that children seek out and master, normal development progressively extinguishes age-typical fears, and children deprived of such experiences may carry elevated anxiety forward. Brussoni and colleagues (2015), in a systematic review of 21 studies of risky outdoor play, found overall positive effects on health indicators and behaviors—most consistently physical activity, along with social health and behavior—and concluded that the evidence favored protecting rather than curtailing children's opportunities for adventurous play.

What Anji Play adds to this literature is scale and cultural significance. That a public system in China—a context where, as comparative and survey research attests, educational culture has been strongly safety-conscious and teacher-directed (Tobin et al., 2009; Lin, Liao, Xue, & Colliver, 2021)—deliberately institutionalized risky play is itself a notable natural experiment. It has also begun to generate measurement research. Lin, Wu, Wu, and He (2022) developed and validated a teacher rating scale of risky play with 1,376 three- to six-year-olds in four kindergartens practicing Anji Play in East China, finding a psychometrically sound two-factor structure spanning play at height and at speed. An instrument of this kind does not demonstrate benefits by itself, but its existence signals that risky play in Anji-style programs is common enough, and taken seriously enough, to be quantified—a precondition for the outcome research that remains to be done.

Reflection: play stories and thinking about thinking

If Risk is Anji Play's most photographed principle, Reflection may be its most consequential. The daily cycle of play followed by documentation review and child-narrated play stories resembles the pedagogical documentation of Reggio Emilia, but it pushes the child, rather than the teacher, into the interpreter's seat: children explain what they built, what failed, what they predicted, and what they will try tomorrow. The documentation also travels outward: photographs, video, and children's play stories are shared with families and colleagues, making the child's thinking visible well beyond the play yard (HundrED, n.d.). Developmental theory gives this practice a clear rationale—representing and discussing one's own activity is a canonical route to metacognition and self-regulation—and early intervention research based directly on Anji Play offers preliminary support. Chen, Wu, Wu, Shangguan, and Li (2022) evaluated a three-month "circling curriculum" for metacognition, explicitly built on Anji Play and integrating reflective dialogue, visualized records, and block play organized into pre-play, in-play, and post-play phases, with 47 five- to six-year-olds assigned to experimental and control classrooms. The experimental group showed significantly greater gains in knowledge of cognition, planning, monitoring, and evaluation. The study is small and quasi-experimental, and its curriculum is a structured derivative rather than everyday True Play; but it converges with the theoretical expectation that the play-plus-reflection cycle, not play alone, is where Anji Play's cognitive leverage most plausibly lies.

Direct research on Anji Play: promising, and thin

A small direct literature on the approach itself has begun to accumulate, most of it in the last five years. Lin, Wu, Wu, and Qin (2024) conducted a twelve-week quasi-experimental study with 60 five- to six-year-olds in a rural Chinese kindergarten, in which the experimental group received twice-weekly cooperative constructive play sessions modeled on Anji Play—child-led outdoor construction bracketed by planning talk and reflection. Children in the Anji-based condition showed significant gains in cooperation on a structured truck-racing task across four time points, with improvements transferring to observed role play, while the control group showed no comparable change. Beyond China's villages, Pio, Huang, Tateo, Dazzani, and Jacinto (2026) reported a cultural-psychological study of Anji Play in a Shanghai kindergarten, based on two months of participant observation and interviews with three educators, concluding that both spontaneous and guided activity organized under the approach helped children cross the boundary between home and school by making play a familiar sign within an unfamiliar institution. The educators they observed assessed children through individual developmental trajectories rather than standardized measures—consistent with the approach's documentation ethos—though the authors candidly note the study's very small sample as a limitation.

The approach's effects on adults have also drawn attention. Zhang, Clark, and Hsueh (2022), interviewing eight Chinese kindergarten teachers active in the free-play reform of which Anji Play is the most prominent exemplar, found that observing and supporting children's free play transformed how teachers understood their core professional ethic of loving care—shifting it from exhausting, hovering caretaking toward respectful observation—and brought many of them a renewed joy in teaching. Given that teacher restraint is the approach's scarcest resource, evidence that the practice can be professionally sustaining rather than depleting matters for its scalability.

Honesty requires stating plainly what this literature does not yet contain. There are no longitudinal studies of children who have completed full-time Anji Play programs—a gap the sponsoring organization itself acknowledges while inviting external researchers to fill it (Anji Education, n.d.-b). The existing intervention studies are small, short, quasi-experimental, and conducted mostly by researchers sympathetic to the approach; none compares Anji graduates' later academic or social outcomes with those of peers from conventional programs. Figures on national and international spread originate largely with the organization and with HundrED, whose designation of the approach's impact as exceptional reflects structured expert review rather than controlled evaluation (HundrED, n.d.). Anji Play is, at present, an approach whose component practices rest on respectable evidence and whose direct evidence is early-stage: promising signals, no verdict.

Scaling True Play: policy tailwinds, belief headwinds

Anji Play's most cited contribution to international early-childhood discourse is as an existence proof: a fully play-based, child-determined model operating not in a boutique private school but across an entire public system serving ordinary rural families (Coffino & Bailey, 2019). Yet the research literature also documents why such scaling is hard. Two decades after Chinese policy declared play the basic activity of kindergarten (Zhu & Zhang, 2008), a latent-profile survey of 674 Chinese preschool teachers found that the large majority fell into belief profiles prioritizing academic skills and teacher-guided play, with only roughly one in ten valuing child-initiated free play on a par with guided play—and more experienced teachers were, if anything, more committed to adult direction (Lin, Liao, Xue, & Colliver, 2021). The binding constraint on True Play, in China as elsewhere, is not materials or policy but adult belief: the teacher's confidence that a child hesitating at the top of a self-built ramp is learning, not merely at risk. Anji County's own two-decade arc—from no play, through false play, to True Play—is best read as a case study in changing exactly that belief, teacher by teacher, with documentation and reflection serving as the persuasion mechanism as much for adults as for children.

Practical implications

For families and educators, several implications follow. First, the practices Anji Play bundles together—generous daily time for genuinely self-directed play, open-ended materials, physical challenge, and warm adult attention—each align with the better-supported findings of developmental research, particularly the pediatric consensus on play's role in executive function and social-emotional growth (Yogman et al., 2018) and the risky-play literature's finding that adventurous play supports rather than threatens children's health (Brussoni et al., 2015; Sandseter & Kennair, 2011). Second, Cheng's distinction between true and false play offers parents a usable diagnostic when touring any program, whatever its label: ask who decided what the children are doing. Activity chosen, structured, and narrated by adults—however colorful—is instruction in play's clothing. Third, the reflection cycle is imitable at home: inviting a child to tell or draw the story of what they built or attempted converts play into language, memory, and planning, the mechanism the metacognition research most directly supports (Chen et al., 2022). Fourth, manageable risk is better treated as developmental nutrition than as liability; the adult's task is presence and observation, not preemption. Finally, families should hold claims for any branded methodology—this one included—to the evidence actually in hand: Anji Play's components are well grounded, its direct outcome research is young, and a thoughtful program that shares its principles deserves neither uncritical faith nor reflexive doubt, but attentive watching—which is, fittingly, exactly the discipline it asks of teachers.

What, finally, should the research community make of Anji Play? A century of progressive education has produced many beautiful demonstrations that children flourish when trusted; it has produced very few demonstrations that an ordinary public system, staffed by ordinary teachers and funded at public rates, can institutionalize that trust. That is the demonstration Anji County offers, and it is why ministries, foundations, and researchers have taken notice out of proportion to the size of the direct evidence base. The approach's five principles read less like a curriculum than like a sequence of hypotheses—that love permits risk, that risk yields joy, that joy sustains engagement, and that reflection turns engagement into understanding—each of which now has enough supporting literature to justify the larger, longer studies that have not yet been done. Until they are, the fairest summary is this: Anji Play stands on strong theoretical and component-level evidence, offers the world's most extensive working model of self-determined early learning at public scale, and awaits the longitudinal research that would tell us what its graduates carry with them. The children on the ladders, meanwhile, are not waiting.

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