Famine Relief in Warlord China by Pierre Fuller (review)

Pierre Fuller’s Famine Relief in Warlord China (hereafter Famine Relief) shows that the coordinated famine relief efforts made by the Chinese warlord authorities, the local philanthropic gentry, and private organizations during the North China Famine of 1920–1921 effectively sustained the lives of millions of poor peasants and urban residents. These efforts, Fuller points out, lessened the severity of famine that would otherwise have inflicted more devastations upon the people in five provinces of North China. To be sure, the famine claimed half a million lives, yet was not so devastating in comparison with the North China Famine of 1876–1879, which resulted from a drought across the same five provinces, and caused the deaths of 9–13 million people. The famine relief in 1920–1921, Fuller argues, proved to be a success, owing critically to the mitigation of the mortality level the relief efforts brought about. Previous scholarship of this famine has relied largely on the records of the China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC), in which the success of the famine relief was attributed to three factors: China’s new railways that transported relief food quickly, Manchuria’s sorghum that filled the freight cars, and the joint efforts made by international relief committees of Western missionaries and philanthropists in organizing relief work and managing relief funds. Famine Relief, however, provides a revisionist account showing that the responses from Chinese warlords, gentry, and private organizations were instrumental in saving the famished people. The Chinese famine relief effort, Fuller points out, had already begun in the summer of 1920, while international aid only reached the famine victims of the disaster regions in April and May 1921, or in the last quarter of the famine year. That year was soon followed by normal spring harvests. Put simply, the Chinese famine relief played the predominant role for the first half of the famine, which was a larger portion of the relief efforts, and that the famine relief of 1920–1921 was largely a Chinese story.

An impressive aspect of this book is its brilliant use of Chinese railway records. Due to the fragmentation of source materials, this book was no doubt adifficult one to write. Fuller’s method was to piece together a famine relief history based on stories from many walks of life, for which he employs a broad range of sources that include archives in Beijing and London; Chinese local gazetteers, stele inscriptions, contemporary periodicals and newspapers, contemporary individual observations and memoirs, and the famine relief reports of the CIFRC and American Red Cross. Yet, the information uncovered from these sources are mostly brief news reports, individual short accounts of the famine conditions and philanthropic deeds, and the statements of the governmental authorities on relief matters. These documents are usually inconsistent and insufficient for a systematic reconstruction of the famine relief history. Not even the CIFRC’s series of annual reports can permit a researcher to see the famine relief history in a panoramic view, as these reports documented mostly the CIFRC’s famine relief programs in the post-famine years. Realizing that “we have only scattered and spotty reports of the famine response in some three hundred afflicted counties over the nine-month crisis” (p. 126) or often “sources are too scarce” (p. 159), Fuller makes a lot of judgments “based on scattered news reports” (p. 63)or “with the limited sources” (p. 69). Sometimes Fuller can only make educated assessments of an event because “our source stops there” (p. 143), or that “we cannot be sure” (p. 145) how a relief program was carried out. Notwithstanding the scatteredness and incompleteness of sources, Fuller discovered the railway shipment data in zhengfu gongbo (Government Bulletin), which lays Fuller’s study on a solid cornerstone. In December 1920, for instance, freight cars transported a total 170,457,191 jin of relief food from various Chinese sources into the famine provinces, “enough for daily rations of half a jin over thirty-one days for...