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Two major famine crisis in China during the 1920s resulted in the response of the international community. The elevated compassion for the affected populations in Northern China materialized through famine relief action. This essay is focusing on how relief actors coordinated against the background of interwar international volatility and the general troubled fragmentation of Republican China. The international famine relief in 1920s China operated under a loose defined humanitarian hegemony. British, the US and Chinese historical actors were its main humanitarian stakeholders with each one carrying own distinctive relief traditions, ideas and practices. The China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC) and the American Red Cross(ARC) were the two of the main and most influential providers of famine relief in synergy with other non-state actors, US, British and Chinese official authorities. During the first famine (1920-1921) the relief was relatively successful based on consensus and compromise of interests and humanitarian principles. However, during the second largest in scale famine(1928-1930), the ARC decided to stop providing relief breaking the fragile hegemonic humanitarian alliance mostly due to its differentiated perception of the nature of the famine relief and against a destabilizing international environment.
2015 •
Humanitarian aid is in many ways a malleable concept. It covers a broad range of activities, including emergency relief delivered to people struck by natural or manmade disasters; longer-term efforts to prevent suffering from famine, ill-health, or poverty; and schemes such as international adoption, specific campaigns against human rights abuses, and humanitarian intervention by armed forces. This essay focuses primarily on emergency relief. After a brief overview of the different terms and concepts of humanitarian aid, I discuss existing narratives of international humanitarian aid and identify crucial historical conjunctures during the twentieth century.
Positive Disruption? China’s Humanitarian Aid
Positive Disruption? China’s Humanitarian Aid2019 •
China’s global aid program is evolving and expanding prompting considerable interest from the international humanitarian sector. Much attention has been paid to developments in Chinese aid. Most work examines the geopolitical, development aid and security policy angles, rather than the operational and policy implications for humanitarian aid. There is less understanding of how Chinese and traditional actors can engage on humanitarian reform. This practice paper aims to address that gap, as part of the Humanitarian Horizons research program, which seeks to stimulate discussion and inform practice.
Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development
Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid during the Twentieth Century2013 •
Chinese Perpectives 2010 no. 4
Review of Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008)The Economic History Review
The ripple that drowns? Twentieth-century famines in China and India as economic history 12008 •
2017 •
This article analyses the development of organised relief for global natural disasters in the years after the First World War, c. 1919 – 1932. It does so by telling two concurrent humanitarian narratives, one focused on a transnational institution, the other on the international affairs of a single nation-state. First, it examines the emergence of the United States as a key figure in global disaster relief at this time. Here, it pays close attention to the transnational connections that American citizens, voluntary associations, and government agencies forged with people in other nations through disaster aid. The article then traces the origins and rise of the League of Red Cross Societies as a leading institution of voluntary transnational disaster assistance during the 1920s and early 1930s, thus recovering the untold history of the organisation’s earliest disaster relief operations. Analysing these narratives in tandem and considering the links between them, I argue, offers important new perspectives on the history of transnational disaster relief at a key stage in its historical development, the interwar years.
Moving the Social
Connected by Calamity: The United States, the League of Red Cross Societies, and Transnational Disaster Assistance after the First World War2017 •
This article analyses the development of organised relief for global natural disasters in the years after the First World War, c. 1919 – 1932. It does so by telling two concurrent humanitarian narratives, one focused on a transnational institution, the other on the international affairs of a single nation-state. First, it examines the emergence of the United States as a key figure in global disaster relief at this time. Here, it pays close attention to the transnational connections that American citizens, voluntary associations, and government agencies forged with people in other nations through disaster aid. The article then traces the origins and rise of the League of Red Cross Societies as a leading institution of voluntary transnational disaster assistance during the 1920s and early 1930s, thus recovering the untold history of the organisation’s earliest disaster relief operations. Analysing these narratives in tandem and considering the links between them, I argue, offers impor...
This volume throws light on present-day debates over crisis relief. It explores the history of humanitarian aid, revealing fundamental dilemmas which have been inherent in humanitarian practice since its beginning. The urge to relieve distant suffering and make the world a better place, the evolving nature of humanitarian organizations, international politics, and political economy have all contributed to making humanitarian aid a dynamic field of global dimensions. Closely linked to empire, religious and secular organizations, and warfare, the boundaries were blurred between humanitarian relief, development aid, human rights, and humanitarian intervention. Essays based on primary research analyse the multi-layered system of humanitarian aid. They show how aid policy developed in the context of colonialism, two world wars, Cold War and decolonization up to the global challenges of the present day.

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2014 •
The Chinese Historical Review
Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China2008 •
2014 •
Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d'histoire du droit international
Sovereignty and the Chinese Red Cross Society: The Differentiated Practice of International Law in Shandong, 1914–19162011 •
2011 •
Frontiers of History in China, 2014, 9(4)
(2014) Public Health and Private Charity in Northeast China, 1905–19452018 •
Population and Development Review
Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay*2011 •
Diplomatic History, "Legacies of World War I Commemorative Issue" (2014).
Taming Total War: Great War–Era American Humanitarianism and its Legacies (Diplomatic History, 2014; Revised and expanded version in Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War, Oxford University Press, 2017).Overseas Development Institute Working Paper
Understanding Humanitarian Action in East and Southeast Asia: a historical perspective2014 •
2018 •
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2018 •