Between Mao and McCarthy: China’s Children and the Cold War

At the time of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, tens of thousands of Chinese children lived in orphanages funded by transnational humanitarian organizations. This sizeable population of children who benefited from foreign largesse created a political predicament for China’s new Communist government. While the CCP accused Western aid organizations of “cultural imperialism,” they were hesitant to shut down institutions upon which so many vulnerable children depended. This paper follows the fates of two American-funded orphanages—Chiang Memorial Children’s Village in Chongqing and Canaan Children’s Home in Beijing—during the uncertain months following the revolution. I analyze how Chinese relief workers and foreign missionaries appealed to the apolitical nature of child welfare and the idea of children as universal subjects to justify their work in the rapidly polarizing political climates of Mao’s China and Joseph McCarthy’s America. Using children’s letters, orphanage records, and Chinese government reports, I argue that child welfare became a fraught arena for testing the limits of Sino-Western collaboration in the midst of the quickly descending Cold War.

Diplomatic historians have long debated whether there was a “lost chance” for closer Sino-American ties in the immediate aftermath of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Instead, this paper examines the Sino-American cooperation that actually did occur in the realm of child welfare work. I show how the emotional loyalties of children became an important battleground on the affective terrain of Cold War East Asia. More broadly, I argue that shifting focus from high-level diplomacy to international child welfare work offers a new perspective on the politics of the Cold War in East Asia, revealing a messy reality of compromise and negotiation taking place just behind the sharply drawn ideological battlelines.