Introduction
When the parched fields of north China brought famine to five provinces in 1920, many millions faced starvation in the hard winter ahead. Rainless skies had desiccated a swath of plains and piedmonts north of the Yellow River from coastal Shandong to inland Shaanxi and as far north as the outskirts of Beijing. Despite hitting in the early years of the so-called warlord era, though, it was a moment of relative peace for the stricken north China plain—the stubborn scourge of bandits and marauding soldiers aside—coming between the Anhui-Zhili faction war of July 1920 and the first Zhili-Fengtian war in April–May 1922. Grain in the winter of 1920–1921 was sped into the famine belt at potentially record levels and by spring only three per cent of the region's impoverished had succumbed to hunger, exposure or related diseases—500,000 out of more than 20 million peopleFootnote 1—a huge relief success relative to China's other major modern famines, and a success that has yet to be adequately explained.
‘Public health, famine relief, and local administration were neglected’ by the Interior Ministry, one historian has written on the period, while the financial appetites of ‘politicians and warlords’ kept the state on the brink of fiscal collapse. Onto the scene in 1921 appeared foreign actors who ‘made the difference’ for China in the form of international relief, and many millions were saved. This decidedly bleak take on the Chinese Republic—articulated in this case by Andrew Nathan—has long set the tone for studies of early twentieth century China: government was but a money-pit, Chinese society a humanitarian morass begging for outside intervention.Footnote 2 More recently, contributions to the literature on modern Chinese disaster relief have identified periods of native relief advances that bookend the 1920s warlord period, starting with the efforts of late Qing reformers in the 1870s—largely lower-Yangzi elites acting in tandem with missionaries to relieve massive drought famine in the poorer North—and then a re-invigorated 1930s relief culture under the Nationalists and the flowering of more permanent relief agents such as the Chinese Red Cross.Footnote 3
Our current understanding of 1920s great north China drought famine fits comfortably into both of the above schemas, seeing the year's extraordinary relief success as a function of the combined interventions of foreigners and cosmopolitan Chinese using ‘modern’ relief models. These models were inspired, if not imported, from overseas, thus fitting into the rocky but steady trajectory of relief advances by a modernizing Chinese society from the 1870s into the twentieth century. In this view, any noteworthy relief in 1920 beyond that mobilized by President Woodrow Wilson in the United States and his activist minister to Beijing, Charles P. Crane, was generated in China's major cities (Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, along with provincial centres such as Taiyuan, Jinan, and Kaifeng) through the vehicle of joint Chinese-foreign relief societies, each taking on a designated part of the disaster zone.
This dominance by the international committees of the 1920–1921 relief narrative was in part a product of their own publicity. The Chinese state was fast decentralizing in the years leading up to the famine, and state archival materials on relief in the early Republic remain, at best, thin and scattered. Consequently, although archive-based studies do exist on particular urban charitable institutions spanning the republican period,Footnote 4 we lack a broad, textured picture of relief in turbulent 1920s north China, and especially of local responses to the young Republic's greatest humanitarian challenge. Into this vacuum entered what has remained the most authoritative account available on the famine, a 1922 wrap-up report by the Peking United International Famine Relief Committee entitled The North China Famine of 1920–1921, which credited non-Chinese with a full four of ten relief dollars that year.Footnote 5
Part of a larger research project,Footnote 6 this paper examines the 1920 experience in Zhili Province—today's Hebei, and the year's epicentre of famine—to make the case that loss of life was kept at a minimum in 1920 as much by three parallel spheres of relief activity: lesser-known Chinese relief societies, including lay Buddhist groups operating along monastic networks; a factionalized but notably coordinated state apparatus that also accepted refugees by the million fleeing to distant parts of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria; and local efforts rising organically from communities drawing from an indigenous north Chinese legacy of charity relief. Occurring in a socially and culturally transitional period of the post-Qing Republic, non-official relief in 1920–1921 evidently flowed in parallel social channels. Some—widely visible, thus dominating histories of the event—dispatched assistance to the hinterland through missionary networks and those of new and high-profile civic organizations, groups that in turn reassured donors worldwide of proper management and accounting through self-published reportsFootnote 7 and those appearing in the proliferating media organs of urban society. In others, relief activity, run largely on personal acquaintance and trust—and finding its way most readily into gazetteer biographies or the local news briefs of small dailies—both drew resources into afflicted communities and received refugees in neighbouring ones through customary nodes of civic networking: native-place associations, monastic networks, local gentry and merchant circles or convening friends and colleagues. The skewed, treaty port-based version of events as it exists today in the slim scholarly treatments of the great north China famine of 1920–1921 is then largely a function of a disparity in paper production, one that has resulted in, at best, half the story being told. In short, if native networks and stricken communities themselves had not carried their own through the seven or so months of crop failure before the international effort fully mobilized, and if warlord politicians had not facilitated the free movement of relief resources and refugees, then the fates of untold numbers of the starving would never have even made it into the hands of the international community.
The crisis in numbers
Parsing out whom was fed by whom and when across north and central China during a roughly nine-month period is a task that defies precision. Still, if we consider the larger picture, of the famine's low estimate of 20 million disaster victims needing aid in order to survive to the spring, the international societies credited themselves with assisting about seven million people, or a third of the total, ‘a large proportion of whom’, the Peking United International Famine Relief Committee noted in its 1922 wrap-up report, ‘were cared for only in the last two months of the famine’. More precisely, then, joint native-foreign groups had a hand in pulling about seven million people through the winter, but had by no means an exclusive role; many if not most of those passing through international relief stations in the interior were undoubtedly carried through an earlier (or later) part of the crisis by other efforts which are explored below. How the other 13 million plus pulled through to the spring harvest remains unexplained; many in the famine field were left to fend for themselves due to the stretched resources of the international societies. As the Peking Committee noted regarding its work in south Zhili's Daming County (population half a million) the society ‘decided to omit certain villages completely and the villages to be helped were selected from the government lists [of needy districts and households] by lot. . .’Footnote 8 Nor can the efforts of the Christian missions account for the miraculous numbers clinging onto life that year: although in places missions played crucial relief roles, the 1920 famine zone had in fact one of the sparsest presences of evangelistic centres in all of north, central or south China.Footnote 9 For the international Peking Committee, the survival of so many apparently unassisted Chinese was a riddle, attributable to, among other things, a ‘mild winter’ and the ‘surprising capacity of the Chinese’ to live off tree bark and leaves.Footnote 10 Below we will explore other possibilities. Finally, the extent of other, thus-far unrecognized relief efforts is suggested by the mammoth discrepancy between projected relief needs at the outset of the famine—a ‘conservative estimate’ of $200 millions, according to Reuters in September 1920—and the relief total of $37 millions that dominates the historical record for this event, which is a remarkably modest total for all relief actors domestic and foreign, urban and rural, public and private, offered by the same widely-cited 1922 wrap-up report.Footnote 11 And even if projected needs were indeed overblown—if in the end just half, even a third of $200 millions was actually spent in the course of the relief effort—this would still mean many millions of dollars remain unattributed. The task below is to sketch what was occurring in these yawning numerical gaps.
Price problems
In early July 1920, about the time residents north of Beijing were reportedly gathered in their hundreds to pray for rain—a full year of dry skies having priced millions out of the north China grain market—the magistrate of Wan County, central Zhili, was releasing on loan 2,000 shi Footnote 12 of grain from the county granary; Zhili's Ding County was soon establishing a charity granary in each of its villages with contribution requirements based on land ownership; Zhili's Cang County magistrate was selling over 3,000 shi of grain from the county granary at below-market rates to ‘level grain prices’—a time-honoured practice known as pingtiao. Then in August, in ‘preparation against disaster and disorder’, the magistrate of Zhili's Wuqiao County released over 27,700 diao (strings of 100 coppers or 1,000 cash) in granary funds for the local agricultural association to secure millet ‘at once’ for granary storage; and the magistrate of Guangzong County, also in Zhili, was setting up a pingtiao discount grain centre in the county seat along with charity granary branches in the surrounding countryside.Footnote 13 Despite scathing commentary to the contrary in reformist publications that autumn,Footnote 14 north China's drought of many months was prompting more than handwringing among the ranks of local officials. The funding for these below-market sales was most commonly sourced from local merchant and gentry households with the prodding of the county magistrate,Footnote 15 and with granary stocks exhausted, counties were soon sending agents to procure grain in neighbouring provinces—in the case of Zhao County, central Zhili, 12,000 shi of grain from Shanxi and Henan in late August—to curb rising prices at home with pingtiao sales.Footnote 16
Beijing, abutting drought-stricken agricultural zones in 1920 that had also suffered a regional war in July, was too pinched by scarcity. The first concerted effort to force down rising food prices in the capital, though, was strikingly informal, launched by gentry (shendong) Feng Gongdu who, along with nine other ‘like-minded people (tongzhi)’, established what was generically referred to in the press as the ‘Zhili Gentry Temporary Grain Discount Bureau’ at over a dozen locations in temples, ancestral halls, and private residences across the city and suburbs, four of them up and running as early as 10 July.Footnote 17 This 205-day-long operation, which brought in 35,000 ‘bags (dai)’ of Manchurian wheat flour (possibly one million kilos) in one October shipment alone,Footnote 18 was distinct from that of the Grain Relief Society founded by three military administrators in the capital: Wang Huaiqing, a classically-educated native of central Zhili's Ningjin County fresh from serving on the winning side of the Zhili-Anhui war that month, was that same week appointed commander-in-chief of the capital's gendarmerie, variously called the garrison yamen or tishu; Wang Hu, a native of Zhili's Ding County, was a few weeks away from taking the post of administrator of the metropolitan region, or jingzhao yin; and Jiang Yucheng, an Anhui Province-native, had been appointed earlier in the year as head of the capital's yellow banner, an anachronistic military division from the Qing.Footnote 19 Launched on 20 July, the Grain Relief Society would eventually comprise over 20 discount grain stations across the city and suburbs and involve substantial state support, bringing into the capital 360,000 kg of millet and flour as early as 27 August for discount sale.Footnote 20 Both efforts complemented discount grain operations by the Beijing Chamber of Commerce and, among others, Zhang Zuolin, the military governor of China's northeastern provinces who, after having dispatched over 360,000 kg of grain from the fertile fields of Manchuria in mid-August to relieve food shortages in greater Beijing, reportedly sent $10,000 to establish a discount grain centre in the capital in early October.Footnote 21
Two November dispatches from south of the provincial border in Henan describe rural discount operations in greater detail. In the case of Wuan County (which is today in southwest Hebei) the endeavour comprised 33 teams in both the city and the countryside, each with a pingtiao branch selling each jin of grain at 40–50 wen (cash, or 4–5 coppers) cheaper than the market price.Footnote 22 Further south in Weihui, ‘normal (pingshi)’ prices for some grains had doubled by October—from 25 cash up to 50 per jin of sorghum, from 50 cash to 80 for wheat, and from 60 cash to 90 for millet. There the pingtiao centre was set in the temple of the god of war, according to a dispatch in Shanghai's Celestial Empire, where the local agricultural association held its meetings. Weihui's magistrate put ‘gentle (?) pressure on every well-to-do family in the county to contribute according to ability for famine relief’, and in ‘all’ the surroundings districts, the correspondent added, magistrates and local gentry ‘contributed capital’ to establish these centres. Pigeons and sparrows were kept from the wheat, which sat in eight-feet high, by nine-feet wide woven reed bins, by mats affixed on top. So were the finer palates of the well-to-do, put off by the coarser sorghum with which the grain was debased. The doors of the depôt opened each day at nine in the morning; at a purchase limit of one bushel (35 litres) a day per visitor, one to two thousand bushels were sold daily; the earnings were then sent to an unafflicted part of the province to acquire more.Footnote 23
In such a fashion, pingtiao operations in at least 74 Zhili counties effected a noticeable drop in food prices by bringing in anywhere from 190 million kilos to 280 million kilosFootnote 24 of grain for discount sale by mid-November 1920, according to Interior Ministry records, using funds raised by local official/gentry circles and $500,000 of ‘diverted’ central state funds.Footnote 25 If we take the middle of the above spread—which converts to 392,942,500 jin of grain brought into Zhili for pingtiao sale over three months—it would have amounted to a half jin famine ration of grainFootnote 26 every day over the period for 8,732,055 people, 52 per cent of the estimated population of these 74 afflicted counties (and more than the current population of the five boroughs of New York City). To put this into perspective, Zhili's population ‘affected’ by the drought-famine stood at 8,076,500 as of mid-November, according to Tianjin's international relief society,Footnote 27 which is the time our data for province-wide pingtiao volumes ends. News reports from Harbin in the fertile northeast confirmed the arrival of central government agents there in October to coordinate the acquisition of relief grain for Zhili, Henan and Shandong, reporting a planned purchase of five million shi of kaoliang, corn and millet—or 360 million kilos. So much silver was flooding into Manchuria for these operations that the metal was soon trading at 145 coppers, down from 180 not long before, according to the British consul in Shenyang, noticeably increasing the ‘cost of living’ for foreigners residing in the northeast.Footnote 28
It appears, then, that despite the apparent disintegration of central government oversight in the early years of warlord feuding, not only was the civilian granary system still able to feed a huge segment of the rural Zhili population well into the Republic—community granaries and price stabilization efforts that traditionally served as the first defence against weak or failed harvests and their attendant social disruptions—but also to an extent that may well have exceeded the performance of the High Qing.Footnote 29 These rural pingtiao operations were also instrumental, if silent, partners in the first inland relief forays of the international societies that year. Well before joint-Chinese and foreign efforts brought in great volumes of relief grain in the spring of 1921, they focused on what was logistically the easiest relief to mobilize and deliver: cash handouts. In December 1920, when an international society distributed $360,266 in silver dollars in Zhili, $50,000 in Henan, $15,000 in Shandong, and $5,000 in Shanxi, these locally-financed pingtiao subsidies stretched their purchasing power by offering discounts from 10 to 50 per cent. So, presumably, did these discount centres benefit those turning to traditional fallback means of survival, such as basket and mat-weaving. Interviews with survivors of the 1920–1921 famine conducted by historian Ralph Thaxton relate that stricken residents of the highly saline terrain of south Zhili and north Henan also turned to earth-salt production for cash to feed themselves. According to one such interview, ‘As Yao Zhenxiang, who was 15 in 1920, recalls, ‘Few people in Qian Foji [village, Nanle County, Zhili] died because they relied on salt making to buy grains to eat and sell in other places to get through the famine’. In another, salt making ‘became the principle [sic] means whereby half of [Qian Kou village, on the Zhili-Henan border] avoided long-term migration’.Footnote 30 Then beyond this pricing role was the infrastructure the traditional grain discount system provided when in places the effects of full-harvest failure set in: as ‘these [pingtiao] bureaux exist in all the famine districts’, Celestial Empire continued from Henan in 1920, the ‘machinery is ready’ for ‘any scheme for [free] distribution’ to be employed once cash runs out, a fate met by more and more families as the winter wore on.
Free relief
Ministry of Communications records for the month of December 1920 sketch relief in the disaster centre of south Zhili months before relief activity by the international societies reached its height there later in spring 1921. These records, published in an official weekly at the end of the crisis, suggest that millions of south Zhili residents were potentially carried through early famine by the collective efforts of no less than 34 relief entities, a far more diverse set of relief agents than those listed in the much-cited 1922 Peking report.
While official organs, such as Beijing's Government Relief Bureau, the Zhili provincial government, and the Chinese army and navy, were responsible for bringing in seven million kilos of relief grain to distribution points in south Zhili that December, by far the single, biggest actor in the region was the Buddhist Relief Society with 14,625,600 kg of grain, followed by the international relief committee of Tianjin which donated $360,266 (enough to purchase 6,500,000 kg of grain at local grain discount centres), a Tianjin society of unclear origin (Tianjin jizhen hui) for 3,024,000 kg of grain, and prominent statesman Liang Shiyi's North China Relief Society for 3,124,800 kg of, apparently, clothing. The Zhili native-place association of Harbin reportedly shipped 544,320 kg of grain to Cang County in east Zhili, and the Beijing-Zhili native-place association of Jilin Province sent 302,400 kg of grain to Tianjin. The Catholic Church in west Zhili's Zhengding County sent 201,600 kg of grain and 504,000 kg of coal to Zhengding, while the Anxin County government shipped 806,400 kg to central Zhili's Xushui County; the Xingtai County self-government assembly sent 318,000 kg to south Zhili's Shunde city; south Zhili's Handan County government brought in 72,000 kg; and the Lingshou County government in the west sent 40,320 kg to the rail depot at Zhengding. Individual men are also listed in the record, such as Han Jingzhou, who is credited with bringing in 100,800 kg on behalf of Neiqiu County, and Zhang Qianguang credited with moving 20,160 kg into neighbouring Yuanshi County on behalf of Zanhuang County. Finally, for their part the Zhili natives in the coastal treaty-port of Ningbo sent nearly 13,000 items of relief clothing to Tianjin that December, while a relief society covering the six afflicted counties of Zhili's Ji Prefecture sent 7,260 items of clothing to Sangyuan and Tianjin, each out-performing the Chinese Red Cross with its month's total to the region of 29 sacks of clothes.Footnote 31
This last point is worth emphasizing: despite its modest role, the Chinese Red Cross finds mention even in the briefest official accounts of the 1920–1921 disaster, elbowing out less familiar groups who made much larger contributions. One of these, as we have seen, is the Buddhist Relief Society, whose 14,625,600 kg of grain would have been enough to feed 1,500,000 people in south Zhili for the whole month of December.Footnote 32 Records are lamentably too patchy to readily corroborate the size of this one shipment, and clerical error is always a possibility.Footnote 33 But multiple sources do confirm that this Buddhist society, founded by members of the ‘sutra lecture group (jiangjing hui)’ at Beijing's Xiangfang Bridge Guanyin Temple in mid-September, was within weeks collecting donations from the public at banks and temples across the country for delivery along a monastic network to at least ten counties in west Zhili, plus operations elsewhere.Footnote 34
A December report by the society in the Buddhist periodical Haichao yin details how a delivery of grain that month was dispensed in Jingxing County in the mountains along the border with Shanxi. Of the county's 60,000 officially poor, the society selected over 30,000 widowed, orphaned or solitary residents for relief at three locations over a period of five days that month. With four local Buddhists and the area's gentry and officials ‘all in attendance as inspectors’, adults each received 3.2 kg of millet, 3 litres of bran and 18 coppers (children 1.5 kg of millet, 1.5 litres of bran and 10 coppers) for a total of 57,600 kg of millet, 5,000 sacks of bran and 6,000 strings of coppers, plus 1,000 sets of clothes. This was enough to support each recipient for barely a month, a fact the society lamented to its readers in an appeal for continued donations for its operations across the west Zhili famine zone.Footnote 35
Neighbour to neighbour
Noteworthy in and of themselves, the above totals of grain coming into the Zhili famine field would still have fallen short of meeting the needs of the winter's growing numbers of destitute. But this is not the whole picture. These figures must be considered alongside the fact that, despite preceding years of flood, locusts and patchy rainfall, much of afflicted north China in 1920 had not followed consecutive annual harvest failures—unlike in the horrific 1870s famine when years of parched earth led many of the rich to starve in spite of their wealth. Although south Zhili was, as a whole, more densely populated than the North of the province, roughly 90 per cent of its population was scattered in rural districts or in cities of less than 10,000,Footnote 36 and anyone tapping into granary or household reserves to administer village or town-level relief in 1920 would have done so far less visibly—that is from provincial or national gazes—than their coastal counterparts sending grain in from great distances, with all the publicity and paperwork that involved (long-distance relief agents as a rule, according to press reports, applied for provincial passports, or huzhao, to have their non-profit goods pass tax-free to the relief zone).
Historian Zhang Xin has shown how, during a 1900 famine in north Henan, relief transport expenses were hidden in the accounting of what was on the face of it a totally unrelated socio-political organ, namely the Bureau of Wagon and Horse (che ma ju, an elite-sponsored institution that apparently existed in all northern Henan counties for chauffeuring visiting officials), whose local head arranged for cart owners to lend their vehicles to a local famine relief effort in exchange for waiving their annual dues to the Bureau. Hardly obsolete, cart traffic later in the century posed vigorous competition with trains, a fact evidenced by a Chinese Eastern (Manchuria) Railway report from 1924: ‘In the period between 1916 and 1920, quantities of grain shipped over the C.E.R. ceased to give a correct picture of the effective grain surplus in North Manchuria, owing to the tremendous growth of native cart traffic exporting cereals directly to Changchun, or to the Kirin-Changchun Railway’, the company explained.Footnote 37 One foreign witness in 1920–1921 described a scene of ‘long caravans of grain-carrying carts’ in front of his home just northeast of Zhili in today's Liaoning Province, ‘big freight carts pulled by seven mules, and smaller carts pulled by three. . .escorted by government troops. . .The carts came by the hundreds, passing our front gate for days on end’.Footnote 38 Then, China's extensive, if decaying, canal system acted as a third artery of movement in 1920. A young Philadelphia Quaker en route to an extended stay with Chinese family friends in south Zhili described ‘a continuous line of boat sledges piled high with country produce’ during her journey on the frozen Grand Canal in December 1920. She recorded passing by ‘Bushels of hulled rice. Red corn. Golden millet. Peanuts in hull. . .’ as ‘small boys and girls darted through the more serious traffic on small sledge boats, pushed forward in the same way as ours, miraculously escaping accident by fractions of an inch’.Footnote 39
This helps to explain how rural communities in the famine epicentre of south Zhili could have generated relief for themselves well ‘under the radar’ in 1920, running on channels greased as much with personal trust and traditional modes of transport as they were with publicity and the well-documented rail system. This also means, unfortunately, that the further one gets from the North's concentration of Beijing and Tianjin media the harder it is to name and identify non-missionary relief actors residing in the field. By way of example, the fact that, in south Zhili, Li Shichang of Wang'anbao village bookended his long life with acts of famine relief both in 1856—‘saving the lives of many neighbours with millet handouts’—and in 1920—when, shortly before his death, he ‘donated several hundred dollars’ to famine-stricken neighbours—are acts recorded deep in the biographical section of Handan County's 1939 gazetteer. The same can be said of relief in the biographies and grave inscriptions in the gazetteer of south Zhili's Qinghe County, which reveal that Wang Kaiping gave out $500 to ‘villagers in search of food’ in 1920; that Gu Zhenxiang also ‘distributed a huge amount of money and grain in the countryside’ in 1920; and that through the 1877 famine ‘people all around depended for their survival’ on one Yang Xingjian, and that in 1920 he ‘also gave an especially large sum to save the multitudes’. Similarly, the 72,000 kg of wheat and $5,000 in silver distributed in 1920 by gentry Yang Huchen to ‘relieve the stricken all over the countryside’ around his village of Xinji in today's Haixing County on the Shandong-Zhili border was part of a total of 720,000 kg of grain he reportedly distributed to refugees and the poor ‘in both good years and bad’ in the years up to the 1949 revolution. Then we learn from the 1933 gazetteer of Guangzong County, also south Zhili, that Jing Kuiyuan, of a ‘moderately well-off family, happy to help others’, followed the 6,000 kg of sorghum and cotton seeds he gave to starving neighbours in his town of Dongzhao in 1920 with a poignant, if modest, gesture, handing out ‘several hundred jin’ of wheat flour on New Year's Eve to the many poor unable to mark that troubled New Year with traditional dumplings.Footnote 40
Relief is similarly stowed away in the 1929 gazetteer of Zhili's Xinhe County, ‘one of the thirteen counties reported as having 100 percent of its population destitute’ in 1920, as noted by Lillian Li in an important study of the subject's longue durée, her Fighting Famine in North China from 2008. As Li noted, the gazetteer's ‘record of events’ section offers a remarkably detailed account of the county's relief activity in 1920, which included a local pingtiao operation using borrowed funds, a local relief office run by education officials, and aid from various private and provincial agencies. But the relief summary offers little sense that non-official circles in Xinhe performed any free mutual relief that fateful year. ‘Unlike the 1917 flood when people still had reserves and were willing to help each other’, Li concluded, ‘in 1920, by contrast, [Xinhe's] people were not able to help each other. . .’ Venture to this same gazetteer's section of ‘filial and benevolent (xiao yi)’ biographies several volumes later, though, and one finds a list of 24 men, and one woman, who in that same ninth year of the Republic, 1920, entrusted 1,580 strings of 1,000 copper cash (roughly equivalent to $1,000 silver) to the eight managers of a soup kitchen in the town of Sutian in the county's southeast, enough to feed about 500 people through the winter.Footnote 41
This south Zhili operation was similar in scope to one finding its way into the pages of Shanghai's North China Herald in February 1921 when the English-language weekly printed a dispatch from a relief station in the suburbs of Guide, a small city in eastern Henan. There, with famished refugees converging from the west and north of the province, the reporter found 400–500 destitute sheltered and fed daily at a soup kitchen ‘entirely run by local Chinese’. The ‘four local gentry’ running the operation had ‘themselves largely subscribed’ to the money and grain contributions, the latter ‘kept in large matting baskets. . .all sealed by having a board with carved characters pressed on the flattened surface’. ‘This raises the characters in bold relief on the top surface of the grain’, the reporter explained, ‘and not a handful could be abstracted without detection’. Donations were posted on the walls and ‘none of the grain (was) taken for the daily feeding unless the full committee of four were in attendance. . .everything seem(ed) very open and above board’. Such rudimentary theft-prevention techniques and the posting of accounts on the premises were indicative of a locally financed operation, accountable in the main to the eyes and ears of the surrounding community. It was exceedingly rare for this sight to find its way into the treaty-port press in 1920–1921 and, no less, into this most unabashedly pro-British mouthpiece whose correspondent deemed it ‘a great satisfaction’ to find ‘benevolence instituted and carried on entirely by Chinese without graft attached as far as one can see’. ‘Real Charity in Kueiteh’—ran the headline—‘Merciful Undertaking Without Any Squeeze’.Footnote 42
Such operations doubtless arose from an overlooked sphere of rural charity relief, the scale of which is likely impossible to determine; still, beyond the volumes of incoming relief grain attributed above to south Zhili county leadership, a review of news reports and county histories grosses more than 30 stricken Zhili counties or rural municipalities with locally-funded merchant-gentry relief activity in 1920–1921 in the form of soup kitchen or shelter operation, work relief, and bulk handouts to neighbours of cash, clothing, or grain,Footnote 43 an elusive channel of charity that did not escape the notice of at least one foreign relief team: ‘Chinese in many places have organized independent societies for relief’, field workers for an international relief committee relayed from southwest Zhili to their superiors in early February 1921. ‘They finance them without aid from other than local sources. They have established soup kitchens and are giving excellent grain rations. In some places they give one and in others two meals a day. Whatever the number of meals, the ration is large. The man who gets it has all he wants. One of these chow changs [zhouchang] in Shuntefu cares for 2,000 refugees a day and on a festival day 2,700 were fed’.Footnote 44
Exodus
Flight also lay behind the modest mortality in 1920–1921. Farmers and other rural residents without the means to pass the winter, some having sold off the rafters to their homes for food, others their children, fled in all directions from the famine zone starting in summer. One of the closest major urban centres to the Zhili famine zone in 1920 was the Chinese capital and, as in the past,Footnote 45 the city attracted throngs of refugees starting in late summer. Each winter in ‘normal’ years leading up to 1920, municipal authorities—in the form of the capital gendarmerie, police, and metropolitan administration—opened a total of 17 soup kitchens in greater Beijing for the benefit of the poor in the city and those coming to eat from adjacent counties.Footnote 46 In light of the unusual levels of distress in the autumn of 1920, General Wang Huaiqing, Police Chief Yin Hongshou, and Metropolitan Administrator Wang Hu—all subordinate to Zhili warlord Cao Kun's Beiyang regime, which was in control of the capital—decided, in late September, to move up the dates of soup kitchen operation and add 12 feeding facilities in the outskirts of the city starting in mid-October for a total of 29 city soup kitchens (30 in other reports) plus another 30 at locations in the greater metropolitan region for a planned six months’ duration.Footnote 47 The Interior Ministry, which presided over the municipal police bureau, projected the cost of such an operation at $300,000, up considerably from the average total of $20,500 spent by city authorities on soup kitchens in normal years.Footnote 48
Grain was brought into the city for police and gendarmerie-run soup kitchens as early as September when a shipment of 5,000 bao, possibly 480,000 kg, of Henan rice arrived. In the last week of October, seven municipal soup kitchens were reportedly up and running in temples, mosques, a teahouse, an artillery factory, and other facilities in the city, plus 37 in neighbouring districts, and authorities would add facilities in the following weeks as refugee numbers rose.Footnote 49 These official operations appear to have far outnumbered those run by relief societies or other groups in and around the capital. The famine charity of well-known philanthropist Xiong Xiling, the Beiwusheng relief society, established a soup kitchen (plus a shelter) of its own on the grounds of a shuttered glass factory in the South City outside Xuanwu Gate in mid-December. Gentry in the district of Fengtai south of Beijing set up what was reportedly an independent soup kitchen facility there in December, when they dispatched their own agents to Manchuria to procure 15,000 jin of millet. Companies, both foreign and domestic, such as British-American Tobacco and the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, operated several feeding facilities of their own in the city, as did the Salvation Army. Finally, while rare, examples of household-level soup kitchen activity in Beijing appeared in the press: Zhang Shiyu, a native of Zhili's Wuqing County north of Tianjin who had stepped down as deputy head of the army in 1919, reportedly acquired 1,600 jin of rice early in January 1921 to dispense as porridge in the alley beside his residence in west Beijing, a service he apparently provided to the area poor each winter.Footnote 50
Daily soup kitchen attendance ranged anywhere between 1,000 and 7,000 women, boys and girls (adult males made up a small minority of attendees), with some attracting the hungry from 20 li away. Each facility received refugees and members of ‘destitute (jipin)’ households who had received coloured entry cards from door-to-door canvassers.Footnote 51 One report put the number of poor fed and housed at 27 city and suburban soup kitchens and 14 city shelters at 65,000 by the end of December, or roughly five per cent of greater Beijing's population of just over a million people, and more than double the average of 20,000 and 30,000 people fed per month by city-run soup kitchens in the winters of 1918 and 1925, respectively, according to sources cited by Lillian Li.Footnote 52 In mid-November 1920, Interior Minister Zhang Yuanbo ordered soup kitchens and refugee shelters in the city to increase porridge portions to 10 liang (five-eighths of a jin, or roughly 1,400 calories) for each adult and adolescent, and 6 liang (or three-eighths of a jin, or roughly 850 calories) for children under the age of ten, dispatching inspectors to each station to see that the change was carried out. This new ration, it should be pointed out, almost exactly corresponded to the 1,350 calorie ‘adult famine ration standard’ used under the Qing, according to Lillian Li. Soup kitchen officials brought in a total of 1,581,980 kg of assorted grain into the metropolitan region the following month of December, according to railway records, enough to feed roughly 136,700 people for the month at the above adult ration of 1,400 calories, or an average of 2,278 adults at each of the 60 official soup kitchens in the region.Footnote 53
With the onset of winter, the threat of exposure rivalled that posed by hunger and, according to press reports, at least 25 state organs, charities or lone relief actors from the ranks of official, merchant, gentry and military circles opened at least 73 shelters in greater Beijing during the nine-months from the onset of famine in August 1920 to its waning in April 1921. This was in direct response to the humanitarian crisis, some shelters with the capacity to hold several thousand old and infirm refugees, orphan girls, children refugees, destitute men or women, or any combination thereof.Footnote 54 Refugees often also arrived threadbare, having sold or pawned off their clothes for food. Starting in September 1920 Beijing's military and police authorities distributed clothes to refugees and the local poor; judging by a handful of reports, official clothing handouts in 1920–1921 Beijing amounted to 178,651 items (or sets) of relief clothing, enough to help layer each of the 96,850 residents within the city walls officially classified as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’, plus another 81,801 refugees, suburbanites or formerly middling residents who had fallen into the lower tier due to the food crisis.Footnote 55 A significant part of this official distribution—50,000 sets of clothes—was sent in by the military governor of Anhui, Zhang Wensheng, escorted by a dozen soldiers to Beijing's Government Relief Bureau in December.Footnote 56 Then this total of 178,651 items/sets of official clothing handouts excludes a 20-ton shipment of clothes into Beijing by the Navy leadership, which performed daily distributions of relief clothing in front of its downtown headquarters starting in January 1921.Footnote 57 Scattered news reports on the volumes of private clothing distributions in and around Beijing also relate that individuals and charities distributed 39,749 items/sets of clothes in 1920–1921. This suggests a very tentative total number of official and extra-governmental clothes handouts in the capital region of 218,400, which, if including the Navy's contribution, could have benefited local poor and refugees in the region equal to a quarter of Beijing city's population of just over a million.Footnote 58 The total value of this official and charitable clothes distribution may well have exceeded half a million dollars.Footnote 59
While it was not uncommon for local officials beyond Beijing to bar trainloads of refugees from unloading in their districts out of fear of disease or of taking on the burden of their relief,Footnote 60 refugees nonetheless managed to spread elsewhere into fertile parts of neighbouring provinces, in some cases staying with relatives, simply begging for food, or growing robust crops like peanuts or sweet potatoes on low-grade land, such as dry river beds, lying ‘up-for-grabs’ on the margins of communities. Down south in Hubei, ‘no less than 30,000’ Henan refugees were camped in the commercial hub of Hankou on the Yangzi. The British consul wrote to his superiors in January 1921 that the refugees were ‘housed in matsheds’ and ‘fed by the native charitable societies with rice and congee’ while merchant-gentry from the city's ‘winter relief (dongzhen)’ bureau brought in a reported three million kilos of rice that same month for discount sale amid an influx of refugees.Footnote 61
Others fled west from the Zhili famine field by train or foot to neighbouring Shanxi, whose stricken parts in 1920–1921 were largely limited to the province's eastern and southern edges. Lacking Beijing or Hankou's concentration of news sources, Shanxi's reception of refugees is harder to gauge but the few available glimpses into local and provincial relief administration under Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan reveal both cooperation between officialdom and gentry within the province and coordination with the central state in Beijing. Representative of the latter was a shipment in early 1921 by the Government Relief Bureau, which, citing a turn to freezing temperatures, summoned agents from the Shanxi Provincial Relief Bureau to the rail head at Shijiazhuang, in central Zhili, to collect 1.5 million kg of relief grain and 20,000 sets of clothing for distribution at unspecified points back in Shanxi.Footnote 62 In the case of hard-hit Pingding, Shanxi's largest county by population, native activity ranged from free relief at the village, county, and provincial levels to outside contributions from the national Buddhist Relief Society, which sent in 709,500 kg of grain into the county from Shijiazhuang in December 1920, and a province-run subsidized loan programme, or zhidi ju, with capitalization of $65,000 designed to assist middling families through the crisis.Footnote 63
But following a demographic trend since the last decades of the Qing,Footnote 64 it appears that most in flight from the Zhili famine zone ventured northwards to the expanse beyond the Great Wall. While a world away readers of a New York Times update on the crisis would read only that Chinese refugees in flight to other provinces were ‘met by cordons of police at the frontiers and forbidden to enter’, returning in the ‘hundreds of thousands’ to die on their return journey, an altogether different story was unfolding in Zhangjiakou (Kalgan), a city by the Great Wall on the edge of Inner Mongolia and a major source of relief grain. There, after hundreds of refugees began perishing on the roads in heavy snowfall, the county magistrate arranged for their mass burial and gathered members of ‘gentry, merchant, government, police and education circles’ to create the Zhangjiakou Disaster Relief Society ‘especially for the relief of incoming refugees’. By mid-November refugee lodging had been set up, clothes were distributed to over 2,000 people, and a city soup kitchen was serving porridge twice daily, an operation for which county authorities would bring in at least 153,600 kg of grain in December.Footnote 65
While many moved into the northern expanse for free (in places at half price) along the railroad, many opted—or had no other option but—to walk.Footnote 66 In the end how many made this journey into the three northeastern provinces of Fengtian (today's Liaoning), Jilin and Heilongjiang is likely impossible to compute, although one report put the official tally at over one million people by January 1921.Footnote 67 What missionary Robert Tharp in his memoirs called the ‘Henan famine’ of 1920–1921 ‘brought countless thousands of refugees through Lingyuan’, a city just over the border from today's Hebei in Liaoning. ‘They were at their peak in May 1921’, he wrote, when in most places the drought had been concluded by spring rains. ‘Christians and other volunteers cooked (grain) into a semi-liquid gruel and doled it out to those starving families as they went by. Two doors away from us up the street, Mr. He also set up some cookstoves in the street and fed hundreds more. . . . Hurriedly, other feeding places were set up throughout the city, and for weeks thereafter the thousands were fed, then encouraged to move on to make way for still more’. Ultimately ‘the population of Lingyuan had increased considerably with the many who stayed on, building their little shacks on the outskirts or living in deserted temples’. There is no reason to believe that Lingyuan's reception of these desperate families—marching in ‘total silence’, gleaning as they went, with an occasional emaciated donkey or wheelbarrow with children—was atypical for communities along the refugee trail.Footnote 68
Official fears of disease meant refugee movement into the Northeast over the course of the crisis was at times restricted or barred, at others free-flowing. As early as September 1920 trainloads of 2,000–4,000 Zhili refugees each were arriving daily in south Manchuria and within a few weeks Zhang Zuolin, the military governor of the three northeastern provinces, was drawing up a plan to divide the refugees among the three provinces: a fifth would remain in Fengtian; 30 per cent would go on to Jilin, where local gentry were reportedly launching land reclamation projects for refugees to settle and cultivate the frontier in order to ‘make a living (mousheng)’; and half would go further north to sparsely-settled Heilongjiang bordering Russia where local charity groups were reportedly raising money for their reception and the provincial military leadership was preparing to ‘open up land (kaiken)’ for their settlement.Footnote 69 Zhang, whose own grandfather had fled to the Northeast from Zhili during the 1821 famine, ‘appear[ed] to be fully alive to the need of doing all he can for the sufferers and is shirking no expense in the matter’, in the words of a British intelligence report that autumn, making an initial $700,000 available for ‘relief (zhenji)’, according to press reports: $400,000 of which would be to buy grain for the relief of the afflicted in Shandong and Zhili; $100,000 for those stricken locally from various crises in the Northeast; and $200,000 to accommodate and settle incoming refugees. By 23 September, Zhang had sent 432,000 kg of millet and kaoliang to Tianjin, part of a larger stated plan to dispatch 1,440,000 kg of emergency relief (jizhen) grain for soup kitchens ‘below the Great Wall’ on behalf of the Cao brothers running Zhili. (Cao Kun, military governor, and Cao Rui, civilian governor, both of the so-called ‘Zhili clique’ of feuding political factions, would soon fight a brief civil war in 1922 with Zhang, head of the ‘Fengtian clique’.) By the end of October, Fengtian counties with good harvests had been ordered by Zhang to mobilize relief grain depending on county size. This operation was not only coordinated by China's fractured military establishment but was also distinct from that of the international societies to the south, a fact one British intelligence report made clear: ‘As the Governor insists on the [Fengtian] Provincial contributions being given preference over the grain purchased [in Manchuria] by the joint Chinese and Foreign Famine Committee’, Consul Wilkinson wrote from today's Shenyang that January, Zhang has been ‘quite wrongly accused of holding up cars for military and speculative purposes’.Footnote 70 It should be noted here how instrumental China's regional powerbrokers in 1920 were to the relief operation, stretching from Hankou up to Harbin. By the international Peking Committee's own reckoning in its 1922 report, the Ministry of Communications remitted over $8 million in transport fees in 1920–1921 for the free movement of relief grain, an inestimable contrast with the paralyzed railways later in the decade after the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition and after the Japanese took over Shandong's main rail line: In the first six months of 1929 only 22 trains moved down from Manchuria amid massive drought across the North, contributing to millions of deaths.Footnote 71
Conclusion
If generosity and activism were certainly no rule in north China, circa 1920, nor, it appears, were graft, neglect and a reliance on the initiative of coastal elites. Instead we find diversity and a personality to relief responses missing from current treatments of this monumental crisis. In a marked change from what Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley has aptly called the ‘feminization of famine’ in 1870s China, the favoured image of famine victims used in relief society advertising or political cartoons in 1920 was frail old men, a feeble and impotent condition widely seen as representative of the body politic itself (and a marketable one when contrasted with the brawn and vigour offered by the burgeoning print media's ubiquitous advertisements for Western and Japanese tonics and elixirs).Footnote 72 Graft, with its deleterious effect on both state and private relief, was by all accounts very real in the warlord-era crisis, and for a people looking to account for their country's buckling under the Western and Japanese presence it is understandable that corruption, inept governance, and a weak civic consciousness could be singled out even by the Chinese themselves as uniquely Chinese social diseases, reaching apparent epidemic levels during the ‘lost’ warlord decade from the death of Yuan Shikai to the rise of the Nationalists. ‘The most tragic characteristic of warlordism was the oppression, injury and hardship that it inflicted on the Chinese people’, James Sheridan has written in a major warlord biography, and what has become a standard take on Chinese governance in the period.
During the warlord era there was little constructive governmental action, even in critical emergencies. When famine or plague struck, provincial warlord governments often failed to provide effective relief, their disorder and greed also rendered it difficult or impossible for foreign relief organizations to aid the suffering people.
A more recent study of Manchuria under Zhang Zuolin summarizes what it calls ‘Warlord realities’ in a similarly sweeping fashion:
The colo[u]rful warlords. . .came to symbolize the political configuration of China in the early Republic. They tried hard to pull China apart, to destroy the fabric of society. They often decimated local communities and ran roughshod over provincial governments.Footnote 73
One wonders what to make then of the evidently humane custodianship of Manchuria's bounty by Zhang in 1920–1921 for the relief of areas controlled by his Zhili rivals, the brothers Cao Kun and Cao Rui, as well as the reception of an estimated million refugees in the Northeast; of the formidable feeding and clothing operations initiated and supervised by garrison commander Wang Huaiqing and other Beijing military authorities; or of the fluid exchange of hundreds of millions of kilos of county pingtiao and official relief grain between the jurisdictions of provincial military authorities over the course of the fall and winter.Footnote 74
The warlord inheritors of Yuan Shikai's Beiyang regime were indeed overseeing a central state on fiscal life support in 1920. But, recognized and propped up by the treaty powers at the expense of Sun Yat-sen's Canton experiment as a convenient liaison for their varied demands, the Chinese state was also a vehicle for the servicing of debts stemming in large part from Qing-era indemnities that had consumed crippling amounts of state revenue just as relief demands were reaching awful heights.Footnote 75 (‘All Foreign Loan and Indemnity obligations secured on the Customs Revenues including the Service of the Reorganization Loan have been fully met’, ran a news brief in Shanghai at the height of famine in March 1921, after which the foreign inspector general ‘released’ over 23 million Shanghai silver taels to the ‘Central Government’ in Beijing.)Footnote 76 Without any attempt to vindicate particular actors in 1920—many among the Chinese leadership presided over an immiserated populace while possessing enormous private wealth—it is worth stressing that the siphon between civil and military funds was not purely in the direction of warfare in 1920, complicating the blanket depiction often applied to the warlord period as one in which extra-governmental actors stepped into a humanitarian vacuum created by a callous, feuding state apparatus. State extraction and requisitioning from the populace, which intensified after the 1924–1925 ‘turning point’ towards incessant warfare identified by Arthur Waldron, and which became hallmarks of the 1928–1930 and 1943 war-fuelled famines, were to a large extent mitigated by the breadth of the relief efforts of 1920–1921. Evidence of relief coordination at multiple levels of government in the early Republic should further discount what Waldron correctly calls the ‘comic opera’ portrayals of governance in previous studies of the warlord period.Footnote 77
In a recent volume on the social networks and attendant philanthropies of republican Shanghai, Wen-hsin Yeh has noted that ‘Most existing social science scholarship has focused primarily on traditional Chinese networks—particularistic ties that stemmed from kinship, native place origins, and guilds’. Significantly, the reverse appears to be the case in the study of the North where, if anywhere, research has focused on the social activism of well-documented associations springing from what Yeh calls the ‘new-styles of networking. . .the YMCA, the Red Cross, the Bankers Association, the Chamber of Commerce’, along with missionary and international efforts.Footnote 78 In the case of the one northern benevolence hall through the late Qing and Republic on which we do have detailed studies—by both Ruth Rogaski and Vivienne Shue on Tianjin's Hall for Spreading Benevolence (Guangren Tang)—we find that the institution was not properly northern at all, instead founded in 1878 at the height of famine in the North by the northern treaty port's ‘prominent Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang’ sojourners who, in Shue's words,
shared a sense of moral repugnance as they beheld what they tended to regard as the slovenly inefficiency, the incivility, and the often cruel depravity endured, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by the ragged people of the poor and disaster-prone North.Footnote 79
There is no denying the suffering endured by northern Chinese, especially in the turbulent and ecologically-scarred modern period, and it would be a mistake to overstate local welfare successes in 1920 when refugees were indeed cut down by soldiers, preyed upon by profiteers, and left in places to perish in the cold. But there is equally no reason for such cruelty to dominate the historical record: the question of indigenous attempts to intervene and mitigate such hardship remains. We might get an idea of where the current literature stands on this question by breaking down humanitarianism over the centuries in China into the following rough dimensions: on charity, or cishan, specifically institutionalized charity, we have groundbreaking studies by Fuma Susumu, Angela Leung and Joanna Handlin Smith, yet their excellent works focus on the prosperous lower Yangzi under the Ming and Qing (a fact doubtless due to the disproportionate number of diary and gazetteer-penning literati that region produced over the centuries).Footnote 80 On disaster relief, or zhenji (a heightened form of annual dongzhen, or winter relief), we have equally important work by Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Lillian Li and Pierre-Étienne Will, particularly on state measures (and failures) in the northern provinces of Zhili and Shanxi.Footnote 81 When we consider yizhen, however, that is, ‘charity relief’, or household, temple and associational efforts coming and going with humanitarian crises, we find a phenomenon as fleeting as it is understudied, especially in the case of the North.Footnote 82 Out of this veritable black hole on non-state, non-institutional north China disaster relief has come a troubling but persisting narrative: that from the heights of eighteenth-century High Qing state relief, the North suffered a one-dimensional downward spiral of humanitarian neglect congruent with dynastic decline, a vacuum ripe for outside intervention in the form of foreign aid and charity relief from the more ‘modern’ and prosperous region of greater Shanghai.
A more balanced snapshot of relief in north China circa 1920 would help fill this void in the scholarship by incorporating contributors across the country's wide social and cultural spectrum. For one, despite occurring in a well-known decade-old Buddhist revival, no Buddhist contribution of any size or form appears in the literature, English or Chinese, on this massive event.Footnote 83 This is a troubling omission considering the attention showered on the actions of other faith groups that year, and one that leaves out a major indigenous relief dimension beyond the familiar civic phenomena occupying the narrative of China's relief modernization, primarily the China International Famine Relief Commission, founded in late 1921 by participants in the year's international relief efforts, and the Red Cross. Further study is required to place this collective Buddhist effort into proper historical perspective, and any further study might address how monastic and lay networks sped such volumes so quickly to the stricken interior in the fall of 1920 before the full mobilization of the foreign community, before anything materialized from the drawn-out and hotly-contested negotiations for a Maritime Customs-secured famine loan to the Chinese state from four foreign banks,Footnote 84 and before the much-publicized National Famine Relief Drive in urban areas across the country mobilized resources towards the end of winter in 1921.
Finally, it might be stressed that the sheer prominence of coastal or cosmopolitan segments of China's population in meeting human needs in 1920 was less a function of some distinctively modern civic initiative or southern relief inheritance than it was one of shifting official, commercial and informational resources and the social circles with ready access to them. Locally-sourced relief in turn-of-the-century north China should be seen as arising in spite of prevailing economic and social disruptions, namely the ecological neglect and increasing marginalization of inland communities vis-à-vis the major urban centres and industrializing coast.Footnote 85 The problem addressed here is not that international or missionary efforts had starring roles in the historical drama of 1920—their contribution was extraordinary—rather it is the fact that uncounted Chinese feeding stricken strangers at their doorsteps across the country that same year, opening temples to serve as warming shelters from the cold, hauling in relief by the train-load, or collecting funds from friends for soup kitchens, still wait in the wings. With this in mind, it appears that the story of what in fact transpired in and around the stricken fields of north China in 1920—and, presumably, in any number of late Qing and republican crises—is due for a major scholastic revision, one that would point to alternative relief legacies running into the troubled Republic that, by their localized, spontaneous and largely informal natures, have been so readily lost in the shuffle of histories.
