The Chinese Republican era (1912-1949) is the time when American relief worker Walter Mallory famously named China the “Land of Famine.” After the Qing period, the new central government in Nanjing did not have much control of the Chinese territory. Regional warlords – mostly former Qing generals – fought against each other and divided China into pieces.
While civil wars befell China, the wet season never arrived in 1919. The North China – suffered from a severe famine in 1876-79, and as mentioned in our last article – once again faced a deadly food crisis from 1919-21. By the mid-Qing period, the region north of the Yellow River was in a loop of droughts and floods. Years of deforestation and the disastrous flood in 1917 laid the ground for a serious famine. In addition, crops in North China heavily relied on the summer rainy season, and when it did not come in time, so did the harvests that the peasants counted their lives on. However, like the one in Qing, this large-scale famine did not happen only due to natural disasters.
Shortly after the establishment of the Republic of China came the warlord period (1916-27), and the Northern area of China lost its political stability. Warlords with different degrees of military and political prowess kept fighting against each other in the 1920s. As always, civilians were impoverished in lengthy wars. Most of the regional resources were expropriated, and heavy taxation was imposed. The warlords also demanded the peasants to grow cash crops like opium, in order to raise more capital for the army.
As the situation worsened – more famine-stricken fled from home, skyrocketing number of deaths from starvation – the central government tried to help by providing famine-relief funding and coordinating famine-relief efforts around the country. Local gentries and Buddhists generated relief for their neighbouring communities as well. International organizations (such as the Red Cross), foreign-funded China NGOs, and religious groups also provided aid. As this decade witnessed the internationalization of disaster relief. There were international fundraising campaigns to raise money for famine relief in the United States, Hong Kong, and Great Britain. They provided loans, grants, grains, and clothes to the North Chinese. However, their service and aid were less effective than expected, as the continuing wars destroyed many train rails and interrupted food transport from the South. Moreover, the lack of supervision and a weak central state made it easy for local officials to embezzle the relief fund.
As a result of the unfortunate warlord feuds and natural disasters, and the fortunate large-scale famine relief endeavour, the famine struck 20 million people in the five North China provinces, and caused about 500,000 deaths by 1921. Many girls and women were sold by their families in exchange for money or food. Female newborns were also killed on a large scale. Much productive labour fled east- and south-ward. The North became a devastated land. Unfortunately, the droughts-floods loops did not terminate but lingered till the entire Republican era. Food crises were even worse when Japan started to encroach on China. However, all these are incomparable in deathliness and scale to the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961, which will be the topic of our next article.
References
Manning, Kimberley Ens and Felix Wemheuer ed. (2011). Eating bitterness : New perspectives on china's great leap forward and famine. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Hu, A. (2013). The great leap forward, 1957-1965. Enrich Professional Publishing Private Limited.
Hsiung, P. and Wang, Y. (2019). “Unmasking China’s Great Leap Forward and Great Famine (1958-1962) Through Shunkouliu (顺口溜).” Qualitative Inquiry, 25(8), 811-821.
Yang, J. (2008). Mubei: 1958-1962 nian zhongguo dajihuang jishi [Tombstone: Collections on China’s Great Famine, (1958-1962)]. Hong Kong: Tiandi Books.
Dikötter, Frank (2018). Mao's great famine: the history of China's most devastating catastrophe, 1958-62. Bloomsbury Paperbacks.