| Abstract | This dissertation discusses the founding and development of the Chinese Red Cross Society, and how the Society's success reflected important social and political developments in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in 1904 in Shanghai, by 1937 the Chinese Red Cross Society had over 400 chapters spread across China. Despite its prominence in China and its international significance, this organization and the archives of the Chinese Red Cross Society in China, Taiwan, and Switzerland have never been closely examined by scholars. The development of the Chinese Red Cross Society reveals changing patterns of elite participation in public affairs in late Qing and Republican China. The practice of philanthropy in China changed from a sporadic local initiative led by elites to a sustained national effort, engaging an increasingly large segment of the Chinese polity. I chart this shift in elite activity from the local to the national arena and map out a parallel transition in non-governmental elite self-definition. China's merchant and educated elite, caught in the flux of a crumbling dynastic system and an onslaught of foreign influences, used philanthropy, particularly the medical philanthropy espoused by the Chinese Red Cross, to create a social niche for themselves that was traditionally sanctioned yet appealingly 'modern.' This investigation into the politics of humanitarianism reveals the influence of nationalism--and internationalism--on Chinese institutions. This work also contributes to current scholarship on the rise of 'civil society' in developing nations. My research reveals the growth of alternative loci of power in the realm of social welfare action in China, power sources developed in a notably non-confrontational, mutually beneficial relationship with the state. These findings challenge assertions that the public sphere must operate in opposition to the state. Finally, I demonstrate how the ten years of Nationalist rule in China put an end to this period of blossoming associational activity, and in the case of the Chinese Red Cross Society, did so with the complicity of the Red Cross Society itself, challenging notions of a 'coercive' Nationalist state unilaterally usurping social power. |
