明代工赈述论

以工代赈是中国古代传统的救荒方法,明代继承了这种赈济手段。明代的工赈主要由地方政府来组织进行,地方富民(士绅)也在其中扮演了重要角色,但国家缺乏相应统一的政策和制度。明代中后期,随着地方财政收入的多样化和人们认识的转变,工赈获得了更加广泛的运用。明代工赈虽然在实际运用中取得了较好地效果,大批饥民得以生存,但并没有突破其"临时性"的特征,因此其局限性仍然明显。     

谢家福与光绪十五年江苏苏属水灾义赈

光绪十五年,江苏的苏属地区发生重大水灾,之前曾在华北等地举办义赈的苏州绅士谢家福发动各方力量举行义赈。他号召大批外地绅士前来协助,与本地绅士一起,共同举行散发钱物、以工代赈和掩埋尸棺等赈灾措施,在救灾中发挥了重大作用。此次义赈是首次以江南地区为对象的跨区域义赈活动,将江南绅士在以往外地义赈中取得的经验运用于本地,使江南地方社会亦能从义赈中受益,从而保证义赈活动能够继续得到江南地方社会的支持。此次义赈还首次提出和运用官义合办的新型赈灾模式,但也暴露出一些突出问题。     

义民旌表:明代荒政中的奖劝之法

明代是一个多灾荒的历史时期,在赈济救灾方面,明朝政府发展了前朝劝分赈灾的措施,把旌表制度运用到灾荒赈济中去,这就是义民旌表。义民旌表主要是用道德表扬的形式来奖劝、酬答富民的仗义疏财。义民旌表在充实仓廪、灾荒赈济、稳定社会秩序等方面发挥了积极的作用。明后期“保富论”的兴起与此有着密切的关系。     

清代中期直隶灾后跨省赈粮调度的定量重建与特征分析

本文基于历史文献资料,提取清代中期(1723-1850)直隶灾后朝廷组织的跨省赈粮调度相关记载,对逐年赈粮数量进行定量重建。结合同期水旱灾害强度,对其反映的政府救灾力度的总体变化趋势及时空分布特征进行分析,并进一步讨论其影响因素。结果显示,赈粮调度在雍正朝还并非常规赈灾措施,至乾隆朝成为常态,数量上达到顶峰,至嘉道时期则显著衰落;在空间上更偏重于直隶中部的近畿一带,南部则相对易被忽视。当其兴盛之时,在直隶灾后赈济中发挥的作用不可替代,其演变过程在一定程度上既是清王朝兴衰历程的缩影,亦受到各方面因素(如皇帝意志、灾害强度、区位条件、仓储状况、荒政效率等)的综合作用。从中总结的历史经验教训,也可作为当前防灾实践的参考。     

清代常平仓粮食储额的空间格局

根据嘉庆《大清会典事例》和不同年代刊印的《户部则例》中的记载,结合有关人口、灾害数据,恢复了清代常平仓粮食储额的空间格局。通过分析发现,康雍时期,各地常平仓粮食储额的确定,依据地区规模和人口数量,较为简单和整体划一;乾隆以来,常平仓储额在空间分布上呈现东部和西北地区高、中部和西南地区低的格局,它的形成受到了人口数量、受灾情况、地理条件、区域脆弱性和政治、军事等因素的影响,具有一定的合理性。     

晚清山东的官赈救荒

晚清山东灾荒严重,灾荒发生后,清政府即派官员赴灾区勘灾,审户,实施救治。当时主要采取施赈、调粟、养恤、除害、遣返灾民回籍、赎地贷给籽种、蠲缓赋税、禁止酿酒等善后措施,以及兴修水利、植树造林、办理仓储、开垦荒地等预防措施。这些措施对救治晚清山东灾荒发挥了积极作用。腐败的吏治使晚清山东官赈救荒难以达到预期效果,但晚清政府毕竟担负了山东赈灾救荒的重任,发挥着主导作用。     

地方社会与国家的跨地方互补——光绪十三年黄河郑州决口与晚清义赈的新发展

光绪十三年(1887年)黄河在郑州决口,是铜瓦厢改道后最大的一次黄河水灾。对于此次水灾期间的赈灾事务,学界以往甚少注意。实际上,此时以江南绅商为主体的民间力量自发组织动员的义赈活动,不仅承担了此次赈务中的很大一部分工作,而且是整个晚清义赈机制发展到一个新阶段的标志,其实践逻辑甚至还可以帮助我们推进此前关于地方史研究取向中国家与社会的关系的反思。     

Beyond restoration: problems of imperial power in the 1870 famine relief efforts in Zhili

Based on a close examination of the 1870 government famine relief efforts in Zhili, this study reassesses some significant changes in Qing state power in the nineteenth century. Most previous research has sought to explain receding state power as a response to mounting pressures from an activist society. The famine relief efforts of 1870 demonstrate a less well‐known but equally important aspect of the problem. While social pressures had undoubtedly worn away at the 200‐year‐old state machine, they also stimulated responses from it. While local activism had indeed taken over the levers that had slipped from the imperial government's hands, the challenges it presented jump‐started the state machine, tightened its screws and set it on the path to restoration. In 1870, Imperial Commissioner Li Xingrui, under orders from his superior, Governor‐General Zeng Guofan, executed a textbook operation of famine relief in Zhili. Challenges arose as wealthy locals wrestled with Li for control of the relief operation; government officials, too, sought private gain. Nevertheless, the commissioner and his superior conscientiously followed the Qing statutes, warded off these various challenges and completed the relief work. The display of state power during the operation was impressive, and was sweetened by a bureaucratic culture that condoned semi‐legitimate personal gain in public affairs. The pairing of “stick and carrot” redirected the challenges to the operation from wealthy locals into a channel unique to China: an activist elite who sought to fulfill their ambitions by working within the existing system rather than by breaking away from it. Thus, Qing state power not only proved reasonably resilient in times of crisis, but also offered some hope for the successful building of a modern state.     

Jiangnan gentry’s responses to “The great famine in 1877–1878”: The famine relief in north Jiangsu

Although “The great famine in 1877–1878” breaking out in the early years of Emperor Guangxu’s reign has mainly struck North China areas, it has also great social impact on another important area—Jiangnan. The past surveys in academic circle basically ignore the meaning of this drought from the aspect of localism in Jiangnan. When an important movement of drought relief in modern China is mentioned, that is, the rise of charity relief in the late Qing Dynasty, the judgment is not totally accurate. In fact, when they were purely facing the drought, Jiangnan produced various responses carrying a firm stand of localism to protect their county and land. Among these responses, drought relief in the north of Jiangsu launched by gentries from Jiangnan is essentially a continuity of traditional drought relief in Jiangnan since the Ming and Qing dynasties. Translated by Luo Hui from Shehui Kexue Yanjiu 社会科学研究 (Social Science Research), 2008, (1): 129–139     

The Great War,the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.     

Famine responses in the world food crisis 1972–5 and the World Food Conference of 1974

In the early 1970s, there was scarcity in the world grain market, soaring prices and famines in several countries of Asia and Africa. The commercial grain trade was expanded at the expense of food aid. After a brief look at policies addressing the situation in terms of modernised methods of agricultural production for small producers, the article sketches how such policies also affected relief efforts, from the low availability for food aid, the provision of food that was not useful and late deliveries through efforts to tie food aid to local changes in agricultural production and settlement patterns. In part, food aid thus reinforced processes of social differentiation that had contributed to causing the famines in the first place.     

Practising the British way of famine: technologies of relief, 1770–1985

In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.     

A Portrait of Hunger,the Social Safety Net,and the Working Poor

In a study at the largest northeastern Iowa food pantry between 2004 and 2006, we found that neither working nor accessing government benefits has a meaningful impact on lessening the odds that a person will need long‐term food assistance. In other words, the working poor are at greater risk for making recurrent visits to the food pantry than those who do not work. Pantry clients who work are more likely to have sacrificed food to pay for other life necessities. Moreover, government benefits do not seem to provide an adequate food safety net. As a result, nonprofits are experiencing increased pressure to fill the gap. If we wish to maintain the government responsibility to alleviate hunger in our country, benefits for eligible citizens must be increased or food assistance nonprofits need more government support. Otherwise we should face the fact that as an undeclared public policy, our society tolerates hunger.     

‘If they do not want to work and suffer,they must starve and die.’Irish and Finnish famine historiography compared

The 19th century is often depicted as an age of great transformations: industrialism, nation-building and economic progress. Likewise, it is also the period when Europe was struck by the last great famines during peace-time. In this article, I will, first, give a short presentation of how the famines in Finland in 1866–1868 and Ireland in 1845–1852 unfolded and, second, offer some insights into the similarities between these famines, especially with respect to the relief policies adopted by authorities. Finally, the article will focus on how the question of food exports and imports acquired markedly different historiographical meanings. Comparative historiography, especially when applied to famine historiography, provides a hitherto neglected resource that can shed light on how national histories are written and interpreted and the extent to which they might reflect a truly essential peculiarity about the societies in question.     

Coping with famine in Communist China (1949–62)

Several studies of Mao's Great Famine based on archival material have appeared over the past few years. This article is less focused on the famine than on how existing responses to starvation were gradually eliminated in the years before the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, as well as how covert acts of resistance offered some hope to villagers during Mao's Great Famine from 1958 to 1962. China, after all, was a country well attuned to famine, and coping mechanisms existed at all levels of society, starting from a variety of survival strategies adopted by the villagers themselves and reaching all the way to international interventions by organisations like the Famine Relief Commission. Few of these were left intact in the wake of the Communist conquest in 1949, as is seen in the first part of this article. On the other hand, villagers were quick to learn how to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state. During the Great Leap Forward, these covert means of resistance were often the population's only hope for survival in many parts of the country reeling under the impact of famine, as seen in part two.     

The famished soul: resonance and relevance of the Irish famine to Irish men’s accounts of hunger following immigration to England during the 1950s and 1960s

This paper uses a hermeneutically informed analysis to reveal how Irish men’s accounts of acute hunger on arrival in England during the 1950s and 1960s resonate with archival oral accounts of the Great Hunger in Ireland during the 1840s. The paper makes the case for a new continuum of memory which foregrounds the corporeal and spiritual dimensions of acute food deprivation and its significance over space, place and time. I argue that a corporeal-spiritual medium of memory represents a two-sided reality, a pivotal yet nebulous point of contact which exemplifies our understanding of how discourses of hunger recounted over the course of a century help shape reconstructions of Irish sociocultural identity. The symbolic potency of hunger and particular foods to expose a distinct moral and social order during both time periods is examined. I also show how this more burnished and fluid medium of corporeal and spiritual memory highlights the importance of intracultural diglossia in respect of Irish sociocultural identity and with it, the interface between individual, collective and folk memory.     

Interpreting Gender Mainstreaming by NGOs in India: A comparative ethnographic approach

This article examines the way gender mainstreaming is interpreted by specific non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India whose development initiatives draw upon particular ideologies of gender equality in their attempts to apply gender analysis. Its purpose is to locate and situate gender mainstreaming in the culturally specific contexts in which it is practiced to capture the complex realities in which gender policies are implemented and women are positioned to effect change. This is an important focus given that gender mainstreaming now pervades transnational governance and yet is informed by feminist analysis. Moreover, NGOs form key sites in which these policies are expected to be implemented. Of the critiques of gender mainstreaming which have emerged in the last 10 years, I examine how potentially conflicting models of gender inequality and equality take local expression and expand on the importance of framing in making gender mainstreaming meaningful by attending to indigenous interpretations of feminism and gender equality. The analysis I offer provides an ethnographic and comparative contribution to an understanding of gender mainstreaming as a contested site whose possibilities and limitations can be revealed by an attention to its feminist origins, namely a focus on context, process and identity formation.