Famine & Philanthropy

The leading Chinese-language newspaper in late nineteenth-century China, the Shanghai-based Shenbao, began in 1877 and 1878 to cover on an almost daily basis the famine engulfing North China. The news that millions of people were starving to death in the drought-stricken northern provinces shocked Chinese reformers and gentry philanthropists living in Shanghai and other parts of the Jiangnan region into action. [11] The extra-governmental famine relief effort that resulted was unprecedented in scope and style. By the summer of 1878, gentry and merchant relief organizers had established special relief offices in Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou. Over the next three years these centers cooperated to raise over a million taels (about $1,300,000 in 1878) for famine relief. Such elite-run relief efforts cooperated with, but remained separate from, the official relief-coordinating bureau in Tianjin, which was established early in 1878, and which also targeted Shanghai as a center of official fund-raising. [12]