The ‘feminization of famine’, the feminization of nationalism: famine and social activism in treaty-port Shanghai, 1876-9
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Abstract
Between 1876 and 1879 five northern provinces of China were struck by the most lethal drought-famine in imperial China’s long history of famines and disasters. The provinces directly affected were Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Zhili and Shaanxi. The drought in the Yellow River basin area began in earnest in 1876, and worsened dramatically with the almost total failure of rain in 1877. By the time the rains returned late in 1878 an estimated ninety million people had suffered from hunger in an area larger than France, and between nine and thirteen million of the affected area’s roughly 108 million people had perished. Striking only a decade after the Qing state finally suppressed three mid-century rebellions that had threatened to topple the dynasty, the North China Famine, or the Dingwu qihuang (‘Incredible Famine of 1877–8’), as it is termed in Chinese, presented a serious crisis for an empire already beleaguered by foreign aggression, internal unrest and fiscal woes. The extraordinarily severe famine galvanized into action not only the Qing court and the officials in charge of relieving the drought-stricken northern provinces, but also Chinese and western philanthropists living in the treaty-port of Shanghai, a coastal city geographically removed from the ravages of the famine. The catastrophe received widespread coverage in Chinese and English-language newspapers published in Shanghai, and there and in other wealthy cities of the Lower Yangzi (Jiangnan) region the endless stories of horrific suffering published in the newspapers, combined with the mounting sense of frustration over the Qing