Chinese Responses to Disaster: A View From the Qing

By Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

Media reports of this week’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan highlight trends seen as impressive and new in terms of PRC responses to disaster. The quick response of state leaders symbolized by Premier Wen Jiabao’s much-heralded arrival in the disaster area only five hours after the earthquake hit on Monday, for instance, stands in stark contrast to the PRC’s handling of major catastrophes during the Mao-era, when Chairman Mao and other top leaders failed to act on reports that people were starving to death by the thousands during the Great Leap Famine of 1959-61. An estimated 30 million people died as a result of that famine, making it the most lethal famine in world history.

The willingness of the Chinese government to accept international aid, and most recently even rescue teams from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, provides an equally sharp contrast to the Mao-era government’s determination to keep news of the Great Leap Famine a secret, even if that required increasing grain exports to neighboring countries during the disaster rather than requesting foreign aid. The rapidity of the response and the massive scale of the government-led relief effort—100 rescue helicopters dropping soldiers into remote areas and 130,000 soldiers and medics mobilized for relief work within three days of the earthquake—may be new for Americans as well, particularly for those who recall how victims of Hurricane Katrina waited for a full week before 50,000 members of the U.S. National Guard were finally dispatched to the disaster area.

While helicopter drops and the acceptance of Japanese rescue teams are new for China, other facets of this week’s earthquake relief effort display interesting similarities to relief campaigns carried out in late imperial China. As a historian of famines in nineteenth-century China, I was intrigued to read that just as the rulers of China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), sought to shore up social stability during disasters by seeking to regulate grain prices in famine areas, on Thursday (5/15) China’s current government imposed temporary controls on food prices and transportation fares in the quake-hit areas of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi in an attempt to stop hoarding and speculation. Officials even punished seventeen people for profiteering.

Some American media reports (most recently a front-page LA Times article from May 17th) take the PRC’s proactive response as evidence that the government is at last beginning to govern “in a manner befitting a modern 21st century state.” A broader historical perspective, however, suggests that in fact the current PRC government is acting in the tradition of imperial China’s Confucian rulers, who often acted with alacrity during natural disasters, both out of a sense of responsibility to nourish the people and a mindfulness that failing to do so might cost them Heaven’s mandate and popular sanction for their rule.

This week China’s state-run media also reported that quake victims can depend on the government to pay their medical expenses. In late imperial China, officials and local literati argued that disasters were a result of the interaction of natural and human forces. While Heaven might send the original drought that led to a crop failure, for instance, it was believed to be a combination of people’s failure to prepare for disaster beforehand and the selfish and greedy behavior of low-level officials and underlings that allowed a drought to escalate into a major famine. The earthquake in Sichuan is obviously a natural rather than man-made catastrophe. Nevertheless, PRC officials seem as anxious as their late-Qing counterparts to ensure that what starts as a natural disaster is not transformed into something even worse on their watch. As Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang explained when taking responsibility for preventing the outbreak of large-scale epidemics in quake areas, “We should not add to the losses caused by natural disasters and let people suffer more just because we have not done our job well.” (China Daily, 5/16).

The involvement of large numbers of private citizens provides another parallel between late-Qing famine relief efforts and the current relief campaign. During the North China Famine that killed roughly 13 million people during the late 1870s, wealthy philanthropists from cities throughout the Jiangnan region (the lower Yangzi) worked together to raise relief money for their starving compatriots in North China. Some enterprising southern literati even traveled to the northern provinces themselves to distribute grain, bury bodies, build schools for famine orphanages, and redeem women who had been sold by their starving families. While some of these men later received state recognition for their relief work, their relief activities were separate from the Qing state’s official relief campaign.

Media coverage of the current disaster has highlighted the Chinese government’s response and the PLA’s crucial role in relief work. A few reports, however, show that private citizens are responding to the disaster in impressive numbers as well. The People’s Daily reported that by Wednesday Beijingers had filled the city’s blood bank, so hundreds of additional would-be donors were asked to leave their cell phone numbers and wait until more blood was needed. The Guardian observed that wads of cash and piles of donated food and water are being driven into Sichuan not only by army vehicles, but by private or company-owned cars “adorned with red banners proclaiming the names of the donor company or work unit.” The LA Times reported that although the government “has at times warned do-gooders to stay clear and let the army and police do their jobs,” Chinese individuals and businesses have continued to play an active role in relief efforts. “The outpouring of help from the people and the speed with which many groups became involved underscored a fundamental shift in recent years as more individuals and companies take the initiative, eroding the traditional government-led approach,” comments the Times (5/15). In a particularly vivid example of citizen activism, this Wednesday a group of eighteen mountaineers from Beijing, among them doctors and business owners, flew to a quake-stricken country to rescue victims by putting their survival skills into practice, thus following in the footsteps of the late-Qing literati who traveled to northern provinces to distribute relief (China Daily, 5/15).

Chinese philanthropists leapt into action in the 1870s because by that point the beleaguered late-Qing government no longer had the resources to carry out the type of massive relief campaign that Confucian rhetoric and eighteenth-century precedent demanded. The current PRC state, in contrast, is a strong state that thus far has proved to be quite capable of conducting a highly effective relief effort. The degree of initiative displayed by non-state actors during this crisis, however, demonstrates that the state no longer fully controls—and perhaps no longer feels a need to fully control—individual and company-sponsored relief efforts. The late-Qing government reluctantly allowed foreign relief workers—many of them Anglo-American missionaries—and Jiangnan philanthropists to distribute relief in famine areas because by the 1870s it was simply too weak to deal with a major crisis by itself. The present Chinese government, on the contrary, appears to be accepting foreign rescue teams and private initiative from a position of relative strength. The assistance of Japanese relief workers or Chinese citizens is no longer viewed primarily as a threat to an insecure state, but as a way to improve ties with neighbors and further unify the nation.

Further Reading On the Great Leap Famine:
Carl Riskin, “Seven Questions about the Chinese Famine of 1959-61,” China Economic Review 9.2 (1998).
Thomas Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959-60: A Study in Willfulness,” China Quarterly 186 (2006).

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University. Her first book, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, was published by the University of California Press this March. She is currently beginning a new research project on popular memory of the Great Leap Famine of 1959-1961.

History of Chinese Red Cross: Part I

We asked Caroline Reeves of Emmanuel College’s history department to do a two-part guest posting for us that puts the current actions of the Chinese Red Cross into historical context. Reeves has conducted extensive research on the history of the Chinese Red Cross and late Qing and twentieth century Chinese relief work.

By Caroline Reeves

Among the scenes of devastation—small bodies in shrouds; crumpled buildings and bridges; dazed survivors—another image flashes across the screen: something familiar, something reassuring to international viewers. Out of the chaos appears the symbol of the Red Cross, on the arm of a medic, on the side of an ambulance: a sign that there might be some hope—or at least some comfort—for these victims of China’s horrific earthquake.

As we watch the unreal footage of a natural disaster that has, so far, claimed almost 30,000 lives, we are brought back to our own comfort zone by the presence of that familiar symbol, the Red Cross. This is something we “know,” something that needs no translation from cryptic Chinese into English, or German, or whatever our language. But what we are looking at is not “our” Red Cross, but the Red Cross Society of China, Zhongguo Hongshizihui (RCSC). This is an organization with its own history and its own imperatives, a Society whose background gives us important insights into the China we cannot pull our eyes away from today.

The Chinese Red Cross Society was founded over 100 years ago.[i] It was established not by Americans or Britons or even Swiss intent on bringing their humanitarian institutions to China, but by the Chinese themselves. The Chinese Red Cross Society is a profoundly Chinese institution, much as the American Red Cross is deeply American and the Japanese Red Cross is inextricably Japanese. It is one of China’s most enduring social welfare institutions, outlasting diverse governments, changing conceptions of social welfare and dramatic policy swings on international involvement. Its existence reveals two important aspects about Chinese society often overlooked in the world’s media coverage of that country: first, the Chinese people’s desire to help their compatriots personally and directly, despite authoritarian governments or social systems; and second, China’s overwhelming desire to be included in the great international movements of the last 150 years, including the international humanitarian movement embodied by the international movement of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (see also Kate Merkel-Hess’s post on International Women’s Day). The media often portrays China as a monolith, “where the state decides everything and groupthink predominates” (see Wasserstrom’s formulation in his recent article), but today, when China is quite literally falling apart, it is precisely these two aspects that prevail.

Part 2: To come….At the turn of the 20th century, China was being torn apart not by earthquakes, but by political, social and intellectual currents. The formation of the Chinese Red Cross was a product of this turmoil.

i. I have written about various aspects of the Chinese Red Cross Society in a number of venues, most recently as a chapter in UC Berkeley’s publication, Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast, and Diaspora in Transnational China, and in a University of Hawaii Press book, Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History .

Vietnam’s Youth Given a Rare Chance to Protest – Against China

By Caroline Finlay

Vietnam’s history has been intertwined with that of China for thousands of years, and it hasn’t all been pretty. Wave after wave of Chinese invaders have controlled Vietnam for more than half of the last two millennia, and the influence on Vietnamese language and culture has been stronger than that of any other neighbouring country. The Vietnamese follow Mahayana Buddhism, and Confucianism continues to influence the education system. The Mon-Khmer roots of the Vietnamese language are all but drowned under the pressure of a massive number of Chinese loan words, the adoption of Chinese tonal pronunciation, and until the Latin writing system was adopted, Chinese characters.

Perhaps it’s a human characteristic that the closer we are culturally, the greater we perceive our differences. The Chinese continue to fan the flames of World War II massacres and stoke anti-Japanese sentiment. The Vietnamese do the same – but direct their anger at China. Just as the PRC’s government has given tacit approval for anti-Japanese protests, anti-Chinese protests are the only ones likely to appear on Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh’s streets. Ask a random Vietnamese person, “Which country do you hate the most?” and the answer will most likely be, “China!” The neighbors have put aside their differences in favor of trade, and in 2005, seventeen years after China last invaded northern Vietnam, China became Vietnam’s biggest trading partner.

The Vietnamese have had another opportunity to vent their anti-Chinese feelings with the visit of the Olympic flame to Ho Chi Minh City, but unlike anti-Chinese protests in the West, their complaints have nothing to do with Tibet. Popular democracy and freedom protests tend to not be covered in Vietnam’s state-controlled media, and mention of Tibet and of the monks’ protests in Burma was minimal. Instead, the Vietnamese are fixated by the Spratly and Paracel islands, of almost negligible land area but with potential oil deposits, located in the South China Sea between Vietnam, China, Taiwan and the Philippines. All four powers claim and occupy a few of these bits of land sprinkled across one of the most travelled seas in the world.

Anti-China protests are led by Vietnam’s youth, who also make extensive use of the internet. The pressure from pro-Spratly youth led to reports of famous singer My Tam refusing to carry the Olympic torch. The following was posted as a picture file, not text, because net censors and their search engines cannot read it – showing bloggers are aware of Vietnam’s increasing internet censorship. I will refrain from posting the blogger’s name or url.

“Lo ngai về tình hình bất ổn chính trị liên quan đến ngọn đuốc, MT đã bị ép buộc cầm đuốc trong ngày 29/4. . . .Vì tin tức MT từ chối rước đuốc đã nhanh chóng lan truyền trên mạng internet, forum...trên đài truyền hình và báo chí nước ngoài gây nên 1 làn sóng xôn xao và hoang manh rất lớn. Tin tức cho biết MT sẽ kh được duyệt xét xuất cảnh trong thời gian rước đuốc cũng như có thể gặp khó khăn sau này.”

“You should be very worried about the current state of affairs and the unacceptable policy regarding the torch relay - MT [My Tam] will be forced to carry the torch on 29/4... Because the news of MT refusing to carry the torch spread quickly through the internet and on forums...on television and in foreign newspapers, it caused a tumultuous and alarming impact wave. The news told us that MT will not be able to get permission to leave the country during the torch procession and that she may face difficulties in the future.”

The government’s reaction to popular internet dissent was to nip it in the bud and make a point of having My Tam carry the torch. The pop artist was later pictured smiling on April 29th when she took her turn on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City between the Chinese guards in their blue jumpsuits.

Protests were also a possibility during the torch relay, but they were very small and easily controlled.

Blogger haivuong63 posted this article outlining an effective protest at the torch relay. Again, the cautious language shows haivuong63 is aware of net censors and of promoting protests.

“theo tôi mục đích cần xác định rõ hòng có thái độ thích hợp... là lên tiếng về sự xâm lấn biển đảo nước ta của nhà cầm quyền Trung Hoa...cụ thể là Hoàng Sa và Trường Sa thân yêu. Vậy không nên lầm lẫn với việc ngăn cản buổi rước đuốc...Hãy xác định đây là cuộc biểu tình ôn hoà vì Hoàng Sa - Trường Sa. Chúng ta không nên phản đối ngọn đuốc thể thao dù đã bị bắc kinh lợi dụng...”

“According to me, the protest must have a clear goal and an appropriate manner, which is to raise our voices about China’s invasion of Vietnam’s sea and land areas... specifically in our beloved Spratly and Paracel islands. Because of this we shouldn’t act wrongly by hampering the torch procession...We must intend this to be a gentle protest for Spratly and Paracel. We shouldn’t oppose the Olympic torch even though it has been taken advantage of by Beijing.”

Many Vietnamese people remain deeply suspicious of their increasingly powerful northern neighbours, shown by blogger Ngu Yen’s stinging reply to vuonghai63:

“Con thấy mình có biểu tình cũng không thể lấy lại được 2 quần đảo, vì nhà nước mình đã chấp nhận im lặng, và tụi TQ thì quá mạnh về quân sự. Thật ra nếu nó muốn đánh chiếm VN, nó đã có thể. Hơn nữa, bộ trưởng quốc phòng mới của TQ là một kẻ kiêu căng ngạo mạn, lại hiếu chiến. Nhà nước mình không thể thay đổi được gì vì gián điệp Trung Quốc đầy rẫy và nắm các chức vụ chủ chốt trong bộ máy nhà nước. . .”

“I feel that if we have a protest that we still wouldn’t be able to get the two island chains back because our country has already silently accepted the situation and because gang-like China’s military is too strong. Truthfully, if it wanted to invade Vietnam, then it could. Furthermore, China’s new defense minister is an arrogant, self-important and trigger-happy man. Our country can’t do a single thing [about Spratly and Paracel] because China’s spies are everywhere and hold key posts in the government’s machinery.”

The Vietnamese people feel empowered at the opportunity to protest a historically bellicose neighbour, but that highlights the fact that protests at home are few and far between, and any protest can be dangerous. Blogger Dong A SG protested for Spratly and Paracel in January 2008 and was arrested and held incognito for alarming the blogging community. The official reason for the arrest was tax evasion, but shortly before being arrested, bloggers reported Dong A SG had visited pro-Spratley and Paracel blogger Dieu Cay.

Now that Vietnam has entered the WTO it doesn’t face the international human rights pressure it used to, and at the same time Vietnam is under pressure from trade partner China. This is a combination that may even eliminate the one doorway for Vietnamese youth to practice activism—anti-Chinese activism.

Caroline Finlay is a writer for Southeastern Globe, an English-language publication in Cambodia, and has also written for Global Voices.

Images taken from the following websites (follow links for more):
Spratly-Paracel Islands Map
AFP Photo of My Tam from VOA website

Why China's dollar pile has to shrink (relatively soon)

James Fallows has a piece in the February, 2008 Atlantic on what he calls “The $1.4 Trillion Question” – why China continues to accumulate $1 billion a day in relatively low-return American assets (mostly Treasury bills), why this can’t go on forever, and what it could mean if this pattern of investment ends abruptly rather than slowly. On the whole, it’s a good introduction, with some useful background on the people responsible for making the central government’s investment decisions. (The point that one of the two key figures, unlike his counterparts almost anywhere else, has never invested for himself, or even bought a house, is a nice touch.) I think the article overdoes its emphasis on a lack of transparency in China – the way in which sub-prime mortgages were re-packaged as “AAA” securities has made clear that the American financial markets China has been investing in aren’t always that transparent, either – but that’s a matter of tone and emphasis. What the article is missing, I think, are two important pieces of demographic and historical perspective, which help illustrate the pressures on the government. Fallows spends a fair amount of time on changes in China’s mood that may be real but are hard to get a handle on -- e.g. greater awareness among the population that their investments in the US are not earning much money (and some high profile ones have been outright losers, like the widely-publicized investment in the Blackstone Group) and that this is money that could be used to better things at home – and speculations about how much the government wants to, or can, continue resisting those popular desires in the interests of keeping inflation low, etc. I think the big story is more structural than that.

First the demography. Here the key point is one of the great under-played China stories : the rapid aging of the Chinese population. For roughly 30 years now, China has had compulsory birth control of various sorts, and (as most people reading this probably know) its birth rates declined at a rate that has very few historical parallels. So while the number of young people entering the work force every year has remained quite high until recently (China had so many births in the 1950s and 1960s that even with them having relatively few children per couple when they grew up, birth rates per 1,000 population stayed high into the late 1980s), the percentage of children in the population became quite low. Meanwhile, because Chinese death rates were very high before the Revolution, and stayed pretty high into the mid-1960s, there were also relatively few old people. So what economists call the “dependency ratio” – the ratio of people in the labor force to people whom workers need to support – has been extremely favorable for China over the last couple of decades:it's now at about 2 workers per non-worker, versus about 1:1 for the U.S. But that is now changing pretty quickly (thanks mostly to public health improvements under Mao)and China will soon have a fairly old population; by 2030, it will have as high a percentage of old people as countries like Italy and Germany today, whose pension problems, etc., you read about periodically. [Some of the best work on this is by my UC Irvine colleague Wang Feng and Andrew Mason at the University of Hawaii – their paper in a newly published Cambridge Press book – China’s Great Economic Transformation, edited by Loren Brandt and Thomas Rawski, is well worth a look, though the book won't be available for a couple more months.] China's dependency ratio will probably reach today's global average by 2020, and the current U.S. level of 1:1 by 2030.

A country with a higher ratio of dependents to workers –like a family in similar circumstances -- simply cannot save at the same rate as a country with relatively few dependents, no matter what the government may want to do and how many provisions it has to siphon the dollars China’s exports earn out of the economy and into a massive national savings account. And since China also has plenty of investment needs , as Fallows emphasizes – for schools, hospitals, sewers, you name it – it is likely to start spending down its dollar hoard before too long, no matter what happens in US-Chinese negotiations. Its true that both sides recognize the dangers of this happening too fast – leading to a run on the dollar and the collapse of China’s biggest market –but the pressures for it to at least start happening soon are even stronger than Fallows lets on.

That brings us to the history. China, like Japan and Taiwan before it, differs from Europe and the US in having undergone very substantial industrialization before its countryside began to empty out. (Japan’s rural population kept rising in absolute terms until World War II; China’s until roughly 1998.) Thus they were quite industrial before they were heavily urban, in part because they had lots of industry in the countryside. (Think of China’s Township and Village Enterprises.) Even today, China has a lower percentage of its population in cities than Britain had in 1840. There are all sorts of reasons for this – and anyone who becomes a loyal reader of my posts will eventually hear about them ad nauseam; but it is likely that in China, as in Japan, this will end with a period of extremely rapid urbanization. This rapid urbanization is now really getting underway (you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!), as rural industrial job creation slows to a crawl (as it now has) and the rural urban income gap becomes so large that even with many barriers to migration remaining, many more people will pick up and leave. So far, China’s urbanization rate pretty closely tracks Japan’s, with a 50 year lag – and beginning in the mid-1950s, Japan went from about 35% urban to about 70% urban in less than 20 years. Most people think China is poised to do the same – which will require China’s cities to grow by roughly the total population of the US and Mexico combined by 2030.

And here’s the rub. The Chinese government has worked very hard to avoid creating the kinds of slums that ring Mexico City, Manila, Cairo, etc . In fact, this has been one of the few real continuities in policy between pre- and post-1978, though the tools used to insure this -- outright prohibition of migration, guaranteeing land allocations, encouragement of rural industry, phasing out land taxes, various local policies that deny rural migrants access to urban services, etc. – have been an ever-changing mix. To a great extent they’ve been successful in meeting this goal: certainly there are grim communities in Chinese cities, but the numbers of people lacking access to electricity hook-ups, running water (of whatever quality), etc., is quite low by “third world” standards. This matters, among other things, for social and political stability. Maintaining this record as urbanization accelerates will require huge amounts of investment.

Meanwhile, even though the number of new job-seekers entering the labor force each year is now declining, China can’t really afford to see job creation slow down, because there is still a lot of labor to be absorbed. To go back to the Japan comparison, when Japan’s phase of very rapid urbanization began in the 1950s, its unemployment rate was around 2%, so even though people newly arrived in the cities faced crowding and other ills, they all had jobs. Nobody knows for sure what China’s urban unemployment rate is, but 15% seems like a plausible ball-park estimate. So job growth has to keep going, and presumably, most of that growth has to be making things and providing services for people in China. And that means a lot of the money now abroad has to come home – no matter how much, or little, resentment grows over China subsidizing U.S. over-consumption, or American backlash against Chinese ownership of U.S. assets. Nonetheless, Fallows has the main point right -- whether this happens smoothly or abruptly, and on what timetable, has enormous implications.