The semiotics of starvation in late-Qing China: Cultural responses to the 'Incredible Famine' of 1876--1879

This dissertation focuses on Chinese cultural responses to trauma, particularly reactions to the massive famine that killed at least ten million people in North China in the late 1870s. The heart of this exploration of how culture is involved in giving meaning to disaster is an analysis of local-level famine accounts from Shanxi Province, where the famine was most severe. I also examine famine texts written by Qing officials and treaty-port philanthropists. Moreover, the drought-induced famine in North China coincided with a major famine in British India, and both catastrophes received widespread coverage in Shanghai-based Chinese and Western newspapers. Depictions of the “Incredible Famine” of 1876–79 thus provide provocative examples of conflicting Chinese and Western nineteenth-century assumptions about famine causation and famine-relief measures.; Throughout this study I conduct close readings of famine texts in order to identify the particular images that observers of the disaster chose to symbolize the famine, and I ask how different groups in nineteenth-century China interpreted famine causation, defined heroes, villains, winners, and losers during the crisis, determined which members of a starving family were most or least expendable, and formulated plans to prevent future famines.; This exploration of how China's Confucian traditions contributed to structuring late-Qing responses to disaster is informed by cultural histories of the Great Irish Famine of 1945–49. While my primary focus is on how Chinese observers of famine used their own cultural resources in an attempt to order mass starvation within a conceptual framework and make it socially meaningful, I constantly place Chinese discussions of the famine in dialogue with nineteenth-century British debates on how to represent and respond to a major subsistence crisis.; A close examination of the “semiotics of starvation” in Chinese and Western depictions of this famine, then, contributes to cultural and trans-national history by addressing questions such as: what can the unique images chosen to represent famine tell us about a culture's response to trauma, and to what extent can interpretations of famine cross national and cultural boundaries?...