Kolloquium: The Adoption Plan: China and Global Humanitarianism’s Intimate Turn

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2018/2019 colloquium:

Jack Neubauer, Columbia University

The Adoption Plan: China and Global Humanitarianism’s Intimate Turn

After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese child welfare organizations developed a new form of humanitarian fundraising in which people across the world “adopted” Chinese children by funding their lives at orphanages in China. Under the adoption model, Chinese children and their foreign “foster parents” built personal relationships through the exchange of photographs, gifts, and translated letters. Utilizing a unique collection of 546 original letters exchanged between children and their sponsors, a paper by Jack Neubauer analyzes how the adoption plan fostered a new mode of affective and material exchange across national, racial, and cultural boundaries that Jack Neubauer calls “global intimacy”. It examines how these new intimate relationships between the givers and receivers of relief aid transformed the politics of global humanitarianism in the context of China’s participation in WWII and the global Cold War.
Jack Neubauer is a PhD candidate in Chinese and global history at Columbia University. His dissertation, “Adopted by the World: China and the Rise of Global Intimacy,” examines the histories of international adoption and child sponsorship in China from the 1930s to the 1950s to illustrate China’s crucial but unrecognized role in shaping global humanitarian practices. His research has been supported by numerous grants and awards, including an SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, an SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship