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Saving the Young: A History of the Child Relief Movement in Modern China

01 Jan 2013-
TL;DR: In this paper, Apter et al. examined the development of child welfare in twentieth-century China, and interprets those developments within the context of China's long history, tracing government efforts to provide support for indigent or abandoned children from the Southern Song Dynasty in the 13th century CE to the early Republican era in the 20th century.
Abstract: Author(s): Apter, Norman D | Advisor(s): Bernhardt, Kathryn; Huang, Philip C.C. | Abstract: This dissertation examines the development of child welfare in twentieth-century China, and interprets those developments within the context of China's long history. The first chapter traces government efforts to provide support for indigent or abandoned children from the Southern Song Dynasty in the 13th century CE to the early Republican era in the 20th century. The Song government provided grain and other forms of assistance to destitute families and encouraged the adoption of abandoned children. Such initiatives were abandoned after the collapse of the Song dynasty, and revived only in the early Qing dynasty. In the Qing, however, members of a newly formed merchant-gentry elite took the lead in providing relief for foundlings; the Qing state encouraged these works through the provision of supplementary monetary support and honorary plaques. Government relief efforts were intensified and broadened after the devastation accompanying the Taiping upheaval in the mid-19th century. Thereafter, reformers began to focus greater attention on education and life skills, a trend that intensified in the 1910s and `20s when government officials and private activists endeavored to turn poor and indigent children into healthy and productive modern citizens. Chapter 2 traces child relief efforts in Shanghai during the Republican period. Rapid urbanization and the growing disparity between rich and poor motivated Chinese officials, business leaders, education reformers as well as Western expatriates to organize relief efforts and vocational educational opportunities for dependent children. State-private collaboration continued in supporting homes for abandoned infants, poor and orphaned children, and street urchins. Private institutions dominated relief work throughout the period, but the Republican government became increasingly involved in coordinating and supervising relief efforts after establishing the Social Affairs Bureau in 1930. Police and public health officials worked together to improve neonatal services for the destitute, to discourage child abandonment and infanticide, and to place street urchins in homes and give them vocational training. Chapter 3 concentrates on the impact of the Sino-Japanese war from 1937 to 1945 on government and private child welfare programs. The sheer numbers of displaced persons and "warphans" compelled the state and civic leaders to organize and coordinate relief efforts on a far greater scale than ever before. Relief efforts were combined with educational services to train poor and destitute children in the hope of transforming them into useful and public-minded modern citizens. Chapter 4 analyzes the intensification of Republican-era trends in the Maoist period (1949-1976), as the state created a hierarchy of welfare management agencies permeating society down to the county level. The state coordinated all communications media and a series of mass campaigns with the goal of transforming parentless children and homeless youths into healthy, loyal, hard-working, and productive citizens. During the New Democracy period (1949-1953) some private agencies continued to function but under increasing government supervision and coordination. From 1956 onward all private institutions were closed or subsumed by state-run organizations. The concluding chapter 5 analyzes the evolution of child relief efforts in the Post-Mao era. The "closed" centrally coordinated system of child relief of previous decades has given way to an "open-ended" multifocal support structure during the course of the Reform Period (1978 - present). The demise of the guaranteed employment of the Maoist era, and the one-child policy, have resulted in a rapid increase in the number of abandoned children, and China's opening to the outside world has led to a broader definition of those deserving support, and given rise to an emphasis on local initiative and experimentation. Throughout the 1980s, China's state-managed facilities continued to employ a regimen of caregiving and youth training that had become the nationwide standard by the early 1960s. But Civil Affairs authorities as well as domestic and international civic organizations new to the scene have since broken from this mold, pursuing a multiplicity of approaches to target the various developmental deficiencies - physiological, mental, social, emotional, etc. - of their charges. In conjunction with the embrace of "multi-approachism," we can observe a paradigmatic shift within China's child welfare sector from institution-based rearing toward family-centered care. As China entered the 21st century, a growing commitment among child relief practitioners to the notion that a family setting was best suited to foster the dependent child's development was reshaping the field of care in a significant way for the first time since the welfare system was established in the mid-1950s.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Abstract: (1998). Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 89-90.

54 citations

Book
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: HuHuang as discussed by the authors integrates three major traditions of peasant studies and uses vast quantities of new materials to present a convincing interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution.
Abstract: Philip C. C. Huang. The author integrates three major traditions of peasant studies and uses vast quantities of new materials to present a convincing interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social differentiation, and mounting population pressure. He shows how those changes combined to produce, within the small peasant economy, a noncapitalizing managerial elite and a partially proletarianized peasantry, a pattern of change different from and more volatile than the development in Western Europe of a capitalizing elite and a proletarianizing peasantry. $37.50

28 citations

References
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Book
21 May 2008
TL;DR: Wu et al. as discussed by the authors presented a Chronology of Wuhan before the war and defending Central China, 1938: Military Leadership and Strategy, and the Battle for Xuzhou and the Defense of WUHAN.
Abstract: List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgments Prologue Chapter 1. Wuhan before the War Chapter 2. Defending Central China, 1938: Military Leadership and Strategy Chapter 3. The Battle for Xuzhou and the Defense of Wuhan Chapter 4. Wuhan's Refugee Crisis Chapter 5. Culture and the Press Chapter 6. Mobilizing Youth Chapter 7. Romantic Hankou: The International Dimension Conclusion Appendix: Wartime Wuhan: A Chronology Notes Glossary

37 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Robert Culp1
TL;DR: In this article, the significance of military training does not just reside in teaching and learning military regulations and skills, but its main point is to temper the bodies and minds of the trainees and to mold their moral characters, show the proper path of modern life, teach common knowledge for modern citizens, and establish complete and flawless characters so that they are able to adhere to discipline, take responsibility, be clear about etiquette and righteousness.
Abstract: In sum, the significance of military training does not just reside in teaching and learning military regulations and skills. Its main point is to temper the bodies and minds of the trainees and to mold their moral characters, show the proper path of modern life, teach common knowledge for modern citizens, improve the thought and habits of the trainees at the root, and establish complete and flawless characters so that they are able to adhere to discipline, take responsibility, be clear about etiquette and righteousness, know integrity and a sense of shame, and become Chinese citizens who are suited to modern existence. (Jiang Zhongzheng 1935, p. 2)

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper examined the new policy movement in China, from institutional care to foster care, which could lead to a revolutionary change in the system of supporting these children.
Abstract: Orphaned or abandoned children, most of them also disabled, are the most vulnerable group in Chinese society. This article examines the new policy movement in China, from institutional care to foster care. Moving to foster care should cost the government little more than it spends now, but it could lead to a revolutionary change in the system of supporting these children. The policy process behind this change is characterized by an interaction among the state, civil society, and citizens. Both international and domestic nongovernmental organizations have been actively involved in the process.

34 citations


"Saving the Young: A History of the ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Shang Xiaoyuan and her colleagues (2005b) posit that the state has failed to allocate sufficient financial and human resources to meet the growing social demand of caring for vulnerable children and has resisted providing the new non-government sector with the legal support they need to carry out welfare work efficiently....

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