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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Saving the Young: A History of the Child Relief Movement in Modern China Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7645h3t1 Author Apter, Norman D Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Saving the Young: A History of the Child Relief Movement in Modern China A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Norman D. Apter 2013 © Copyright by Norman D. Apter 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Saving the Young: A History of the Child Relief Movement in Modern China by Norman D. Apter Doctor in Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Kathryn Bernhardt, Co-Chair Professor Philip C.C. Huang, Co-Chair 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 ii 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 iii 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. iv The dissertation of Norman D. Apter is approved. J. Arch Getty C.Cindy Fan Kathryn Bernhardt, Committee Co-Chair Philip C.C. Huang, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: The Historical Foundations of Child Welfare in China………..1 Chapter 2: Saving the Young, Ordering the City: Child Relief in Republican Shanghai………………………………………………………………………………...67 Chapter 3: From Warphan to Citizen: National Salvation, Unified Resistance, and Child Training in Wartime China (1937-45)…..………….……………………….130 Chapter 4: Wards of the State: The Transition to Socialist Welfare in the Mao Years……………………………………………………………………………....186 Chapter 5: All in the Family: New Approaches to Child Relief in Post-Mao China..….244 Bibliography………………...……………………………………………….…………294 vi List of Tables Table 1.1: Adoption at Shanghai Hall for Nurturing Infants 上海育嬰堂, 1839-42…….63 Table 1.2: Sample of Republican-era child relief institutions………..………………….64 Table 2.1: Distribution of Instructional Hours at Shanghai Benevolent Industrial Institute’s Fundamentals Division………………………….…………………………..89 Table 3.1: Children’s Daily Schedule at the National Relief Commission’s Xibei Children’s Reformatory (Nanzheng County, Henan Province)…..………….…………185 Table 4.1: Number of Infants Entering and Dying in Shanghai Institutional Care ……230 Table 4.2: Number of Infants Adopted at Shanghai Children’s Homes…….………….232 Table 5.1: Statistics on Institutional Care for Children in the PRC, 1978-2004……....291 Table 5.2: Numbers of Registered Adoptions in China…………..…………………….292 Table 5.3: Weekday Schedule for Shanghai Youth Correction Center (2005)……..…..292 vii VITA EDUCATION University of California, Los Angeles Ph.D. Candidate, Modern Chinese History. University of Virginia M.A., East Asian Studies, May 1999. The College of William and Mary B.A., History, May 1995. EMPLOYMENT AND TEACHING EXPERIENCE Assistant Professor, Department of History, Clark University, Worcester, MA. Professor Apter specializes in twentieth-century Chinese social and cultural history, with a particular focus on the histories of children, childhood and social welfare. He teaches surveys of East Asia, premodern China, and modern China as well as courses on the history of Chinese women and urban history. Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles. Spring 2007. Teaching assistant for History 9C: Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan. Topics included the origins of Japanese civilization, the development of feudal society, warrior culture and the arts, the opening to the West, the emergence of the modern state in the Meiji period, the rise of militarism, and economic transformations in the 20th century. Created discussion questions, advised students in their roles as discussion leaders, graded exams and papers, held review sessions and office hours. Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles. Winter 2007. Teaching assistant for History 11B: History of China, 1000 A.D. to the Present. Topics included the Song Transformation, formation of the gentry class, contact with the West, reform and revolution in the early 20th century, the policies of the socialist state, and life in post-Mao China. Created discussion questions, facilitated discussions, created exam questions and paper prompts for the course, graded exams and papers, held office hours. Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles. Fall 2006. Teaching assistant for History 11A: History of China, Origins to 1000 A.D. Topics included the origins of Chinese civilization, the foundations of political authority in early empires, early Chinese thought and religion, contact