Shanghai and the Experience of War: The Fate of Refugees

Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in Wartime China: Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, 1937–45

Abstract: This article investigates relationships between refugee flight and environmental change during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 through a study of land reclamation projects in Shaanxi's Huanglongshan region. During the conflict with Japan, China's Nationalist government resettled thousands of refugees who fled war-induced natural disasters in Henan to Huanglongshan to reclaim uncultivated wastelands. Land reclamation reflected an ongoing militarization of China's environment, as political leaders looked to land reclamation to provide relief for refugees, further economic mobilization by exploiting untapped natural resources, and foster an ethos of dedication and self-sacrifice for the nation. Unrestrained land clearance decimated forests that had returned to Huanglongshan's hillsides since its abandonment during the rebellions of the late Qing. By compelling displaced people to cultivate marginal lands, war also threatened the health of refugees by exposing them to endemic disease. Yet the militarizing logic that motivated these reclamation initiatives continued to reshape China's natural landscape long after the Sino-Japanese War ended.

Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City

Abstract: Shaping Modern Shanghai provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history.

Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City

Abstract: The study discusses the history of the Jewish refugees within the Shanghai setting and its relationship to the two established Jewish communities, the Sephardi and Russian Jews. Attention is also focused on the cultural life of the refugees who used both German and Yiddish, and on their attempts to cope under Japanese occupation after the outbreak of the Pacific War. Differences of identity existed between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, religious and secular, aside from linguistic and cultural differences. The study aims to understand the exile condition of the refugees and their amazing efforts to create a semblance of cultural life in a strange new world.

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

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.

'Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths': 'Bodies Without Masters' in Republican Shanghai

Abstract: This paper is a study of death in Republican Shanghai with a focus on the issue of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins. Throughout the republican period and into the early years of the PRC, exposed corpses were collected daily in the streets of the city. A huge proportion of them were children. Shanghai was like a gigantic funnel that swallowed up lives by the hundreds or thousands every year, even in times of peace. The first part of the paper attempts to assess the extent of this phenomenon and to examine its main causes, as well as the discourses it generated. There was a huge gap between the scale of this tragedy and its social “invisibility.” Taking care of the poor and destitute became a major feature of the work of the benevolent societies. In Shanghai, some associations eventually concentrated on collecting unclaimed bodies and establishing cemeteries where they could be buried after a proper ceremony. Finally, the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 in Shanghai magnified the problems to such an extent that the local authorities were compelled for the first time to get involved in the management of death and regulate the treatment and movement of the dead bodies.