It must not be common for a nearly 700-page book to appear in translation some eighty-three years after its publication. But then, the staying power of this work reflects the extraordinary life of its author, Yunte Deng, also known as Deng Tuo (1912–66), who wrote it a decade before becoming a founding editor of People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. In some respects, the book is in the spirit of the didactic texts on good governance by scholar-officials of China's imperial period.Footnote ¹ In others, it broke new ground nearly a century ago in its political framing of China's stubborn scourge of mass starvation for new generations of intellectuals.

Impressively compiled in haste at graduate school in 1930s Kaifeng, amid a surge of disaster-related deaths in the Nationalist Republic, Deng's work sought to correct a host of problems that he saw in famine studies up to that time. Perhaps most significantly, it proposed that “the fundamental condition of any society has never been overpopulation, but the relations of production within given socio-economic structures” (p. 80) that “turn the hazards into actual, devastating disasters” (p. 77).

First published in classical Chinese by Shanghai's Commercial Press in 1937, the book is composed of three distinct parts: the first runs through disasters recorded since the Shang dynasty; the remaining two focus on ideas since then on disaster prevention or alleviation and the track record of their implementation. The first part is marked by exasperation at the scale and persistence of suffering in China in the wake of droughts, floods, and other disaster events, which Deng tallies at 5,150 from around the beginning of the Han dynasty (206 BCE) to the time of writing in 1936 (p. 55). The remaining parts, however, are considerably different, providing minimal commentary and expressing a clear reverence, even admiration, for the advocates and critics of disaster policies whose works are quoted at length. To Deng, the problem in the past was not a lack of scholars recognizing the links between exploitative policies and famine, but instead “rulers [who] often ignored the[ir] advice and continued to exact heavy taxes” (p. 79) despite “stark social realities” (p. 85). These included war, “extortion by landlords and merchants, and the feudal rulers’ ruthless oppression [that] had trapped peasants in extreme privation, and deprived the latter of any resource or ability to improve agricultural techniques” (p. 102).

To offset these ills, writers formulated preventive measures—among them granary systems and the promotion of agricultural techniques—and reactive ones, such as the regulation of supply and demand, locust eradication and rescue operations, including soup kitchens, shelters, and other programs. Deng sees the quality of famine-fighting advocacy peaking in the Song (p. 187), a period when water conservation (p. 226) and forestry (p. 460) were also first written about systematically, and that afterward, “The ideas put forward by scholars in the Ming and the Qing dynasties” were “largely similar” (p. 189).

Translated here in full—a herculean task by translator Gao Jianwu, who has tracked down nearly all its sources—Deng's work offers extraordinarily rich detail to English readers on the range, complexity and at times sophistication of pre- and early modern disaster responses. The reappearance of ideas and policies in many of the excerpted texts, while repetitive, allows readers to chart the continuities in Chinese thought and practice on famine relief over the late imperial period. The result is a study by a young Marxist scholar based on texts by his Confucian peers in earlier generations that is remarkably free of political cant, appreciating their achievements while fully acknowledging the extreme failures of the past. Deng ends his work by noting that “it will be impossible to make any true advance in the cause of famine relief until our people become their own masters” (p. 470).

With these closing words, this remarkable work ends with a paradox. The subject or audience of the many texts that Deng relies on for his analysis is the emperor himself, or those in the highest levels of government. His study does not give a sense of what the people might actually be capable of themselves, in other words, of famine fighting capacities within communities. On this, the historical record is equally rich in other genres of writing that have also grown since the Song, such as the local gazetteer (difangzhi). Significantly, for a work that appeared right at the peak of the Chinese social survey movement in the 1930s, The History of Famine Relief in China offers little visibility of relief actors beyond officialdom. This is a notable oversight for a study that sought to inspire popular agency. One also might wonder what effect this top-down perspective may have had on understandings of the subject over the near century in which this book has served as “the most important reference source for scholars in and outside of China” on “famine relief in Chinese history,” as historians Li Wenhai and Xia Mingfang remark in their afterword (p. 471).