In Famine Relief in Warlord China, Pierre Fuller employs an impressive diversity of hitherto underexplored sources to answer a pressing question: during the North China famine of 1920–1921, why was the death toll so much lower than that of similar events in modern Chinese history, such as the nineteenth century famine or the “famine” of the Great Leap Forward? Previous historiography has uncritically subscribed to the perspective, highly informed by contemporary foreign observers, that measurements of the famine's severity were exaggerated. Fuller convincingly challenges this claim, arguing that the death toll from the famine was low because of the effective response to the disaster. Given that this was a period of weak central state governance, such famine relief could only have originated in the indigenous non-state sector of society. Most interestingly, this relative success sharply contrasts with famines in the late 1920s and the mass starvation suffered during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1958–62, provocatively suggesting that Chinese society was perhaps better equipped to provide for its most destitute prior to the institutionalization of the Leninist Party-State under the KMT and CCP regimes.
Fuller's choice of spatial and temporal focus is a needed corrective to the paucity of research on this subject. The historiographical focus on treaty-ports along the cosmopolitan coast is understandable to a certain degree, given the reputation of these areas as centers for reform and change during the Republican era, as well as the relative abundance of sources originating there when compared to the interior. Similarly, the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of KMT rule often serves as a proxy for many characterizations of the Chinese Republic as a whole due to its historical importance for the years afterwards and the ease of access for relevant extant archival materials, especially when compared to the Beiyang regime that preceded it, thus attracting a high proportion of researchers studying the first half of China's twentieth century. “Famine Relief” helps remedy this lacuna; in Fuller's own words, “The 1920s, a decade of great political, intellectual, and cultural ferment, remains flyover country for social historians, especially when it comes to the interior where some nine-tenths of Chinese lived” (6).
The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Reliving Beijing,” concerns the various organizations involved in famine relief in the national capital. Chapter One, “War in July,” provides context for the political and military conflict that exacerbated the environmental conditions leading to the famine of 1920–1921. Chapter Two, “Municipal Relief,” concerns local responses to the influx of migrants from the countryside, with Fuller arguing that “power holders and aspirants based their legitimacy not only on newfound nationalist and socialist ideologies, but also on symbols and practices of paternalistic governance inherited from the imperial period—symbols that had persisting social currency and ideological appeal” (67). Chapter Three, “Military Men,” continues this theme by examining the so-called “Warlords” Wang Huaiqing and Jiang Chaozong, using the popular press to track how these two figures blurred the traditional dividing line between civil and military authority in their efforts to respond to the growing crisis. Chapter Four, “Cigarettes, Opera, and Religious Sects,” concerns charitable efforts on the part of smaller private groups and organizations that have been largely ignored by the literature, like British-American Tobacco. Chapter Five, “City Charities and the Countryside,” engages with the historiography on the prevalence of native-place sentiment as the basis for aid; Fuller argues that multiple layers and groups all combined to provide extensive relief in a way that challenges the literature on Chinese national identity.
The second part of the book, “The Famine Field,” moves Fuller's focus physically beyond Beijing to the surrounding province of Zhili and neighboring region of Manchuria in order to show the widespread nature of both the famine and the accompanying relief efforts. Chapter Six, “Village Mutual Aid,” reaffirms that the majority of relief efforts came from non-state actors, continuing the process of state devolution of responsibility that began in the late Qing. Chapter Seven, “Bureaucratic Relief,” challenges the stereotypes of state neglect by showing that “civilian granaries [in the region] were sufficiently robust and culturally embedded in Chinese communities not to simply disintegrate with the decline of the Qing imperial system” (156). Chapter Eight, “Migrant Routes,” shows that provinces beyond Zhili, especially in Manchuria, actively assisted in relief efforts by resettling refugees. Chapter Nine, “Manchurian Relief,” argues that financial assistance from the northeast was also vital in providing necessary resources to the Zhili destitute. Chapter Ten, “International Relief,” reexamines the stereotypical image of relief being largely international in nature compared to local efforts to show that this is a distortion of reality. Following a conclusion, Fuller ends the book with an epilogue concerning the fate of Wang Huaiqing and an appendix describing a relief camp in Tianjin.
Several arguments that Fuller makes throughout “Famine Relief,” and that have been hinted above, are worth reemphasizing and fleshing out in greater detail. First of these is Fuller's astute observation that the period stretching from the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 commonly known as the Republican Era is far from uniform. As mentioned above, the policies and character of the KMT-led “Nanjing Decade” are often seen to represent the era as a whole, even though state structure and central–local relations, to mention only two of many political features, were completely different. Moreover, the Beiyang, “Warlord,” and Yuan Shikai regimes that governed the nation prior to the triumph of the KMT in 1927 have typically been viewed through the lens of KMT historiography, which unsurprisingly emphasizes the negative aspects of those past polities, in much the same way that the post-1949 PRC historiography has emphasized the weaknesses of the KMT. The success of famine relief during the failed state of the early republic challenges what has otherwise been characterized as a time of complete political and social chaos.
A second argument warranting attention is Fuller's descriptions of robust non-state efforts towards famine relief in 1920–1921. The ability of Chinese society to adequately mitigate the effects of this disaster contrasts sharply with the famine in the late 1920s, which had a much higher death toll. The famine of the Great Leap Forward, of course, was even more disastrous. Is it thus possible that the costs of the centralized state outweighed its benefits, at least with regard to the problem of disaster management? Fuller is too sophisticated a historian to arrive at such a simple conclusion; he correctly notes that the later famines were objectively more severe in intensity and longer in duration, which at least partially accounts for the higher death toll. Nevertheless, the comparison strongly suggests the utility of social bonds external to the state in the early 1920s that seem to have been severed and eradicated by the end of the decade.
Third, by describing famine relief as a national phenomenon that stretched beyond native-place lines and across provincial boundaries, Fuller challenges the extant literature on Chinese nationalism and native-place ties. As he notes, the academic literature on this topic has commonly ascribed more power and sentiment to a local ‘imagined community’ rather than a national one. This is not something that Fuller would necessarily disagree with, as he finds that many organizations justified their relief efforts using the traditional rhetoric of native-place. At the same time, this study persuasively argues that other organizations and individuals employed the rhetoric of nation instead, suggesting the existence of a resilient ethos of nation predating the top-down nationalism led by the party-state after 1927.
Fourth, Fuller argues that, contrary to the dominant narrative on this famine in the academic literature, western-led ‘international’ relief efforts did not play a major role in combatting the disaster. Unfortunately, this particular argument deserves a bit more support than Fuller provides: in eschewing an institutional approach to analyzing famine relief, the author is unable to easily quantify the total financial amount dedicated to these efforts, and is thus hard pressed to support his assertion that foreign funding did not represent a majority of these efforts. This is an understandable problem, as no ‘central clearinghouse’ of information existed to measure and quantify these numbers, making his efforts all but impossible. Nevertheless, Fuller makes this claim one of the central points of his study, and his support for this argument inevitably falls short.
Other minor faults in the study exist. There are passages that Fuller could have connected to the main arguments more explicitly, as some chapters seem more like collections of interesting anecdotes rather than coherent descriptions of famine relief as a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the dizzying volume and variety of the anecdotes employed can come off as shallow at times, perhaps warranting deeper and more critical examination.
Finally, though Fuller gestures towards comparison between different Chinese responses to famine over time, particularly with regard to the social fabric of 1920–1921 being more robust than that of the late 1920s or the Great Leap Forward, throughout his book a more comprehensive argument feels necessary for such a provocative claim. Why were organizations and individuals so much more effective at the beginning of the decade compared to the end? Did they perhaps (mistakenly?) believe that the central state, being far more extractive of and integrated within Chinese society than ever before, had the capacity and responsibility to enact famine relief? Might the same shift in sentiment also characterize the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward? Such questions are beyond the scope of Fuller's study, of course, but these questions are implicitly posed by the work, and they deserve further attention.
These small critiques do not diminish the importance of the book. Fuller has mined, collected, and juxtaposed material from dozens of sources to weave together a compelling portrait of an understudied period in Chinese history. His well-supported argument demonstrates that extant stereotypes of a pitiless late Qing–early Republican culture, supposedly calloused by decades of political mismanagement and endemic conflict, have prevented historians from fully appreciating a rich and vibrant society that was able to mitigate calamity. All historians of twentieth century China would benefit from reading his work.
