‘Barren Soil, Fertile Minds’: North China Famine and Visions of the ‘Callous Chinese’ Circa 1920
Abstract
Famine threatened the lives of over twenty million residents of north China in
1920, prompting a massive, and ultimately successful, relief effort. Scholarship on
the famine has largely credited China’s foreign and coastal, cosmopolitan Chinese
circles with this humanitarian feat at the expense of what was in fact a
surprisingly effective Chinese state apparatus that year, as well as local relief
operations by many famine-stricken communities themselves. This study captures
a very specific moment of US and European cultural production on ‘China’ and
‘the Chinese’ in which the great north China famine of 1920–1 occurred, to argue
that our current understanding of Chinese relief culture circa 1920 remains largely
a product of foreign characterization (by the celebrated likes of Somerset
Maugham and Bertrand Russell) and political commentary by reformist Chinese
during a period of post-May Fourth cultural turmoil. If we hold the output of
these writers up to alternative original sources on events that year, it becomes
clear that the historiography on China’s greatest humanitarian crisis of the first
quarter of the twentieth century remains insufficiently insulated from the raw
discursive climate in which the crisis unfolded.