Rosaria Franco

Bio: Rosaria Franco is an academic researcher from The University of Nottingham Ningbo China. The author has contributed to research in topics: Decolonization & Government. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 28 citations.

Stalin’s humanitarian government: class, child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Abstract: Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally

Chinese Refugee Children and Empires: The Politics of International Adoptions in Cold War Hong Kong

Abstract: With the support of new sources from British and Hong Kong archives, this study casts new light on the post-war international adoptions of Chinese refugee children in the British colony of Hong Kong. It argues that while children were ‘saved’ and found families overseas, they were also used as pawns in a bigger political game. A way to delegate welfare for the Hong Kong government, a symbolic humanitarian concession vis-a-vis a strict anti-immigration policy for Britain, and an anti-communist propaganda tool for the United States, these adoptions also convey the competing power and population politics played over subject children by two multiracial empires: one in decline (the rapidly decolonising Britain), the other on the rise (the new cold war superpower).

The Making of the Modern Refugee

Abstract: Refugee histories tend towards the study of particular refugee groups, or refugees in particular places. This past century of war, shifting borders and population displacement has uprooted many ten...

Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong

Abstract: (2007). Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong. The Chinese Historical Review: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 313-315.