The Adoption Plan - by Jack Neubauer

About the Book

The Adoption Plan offers a new history of the rise of global humanitarianism that places the recipients, administrators, and critics of humanitarian aid in China at the center of the story.

Book Synopsis

During the tumultuous years of World War II and the Cold War, new global humanitarian ideas and practices coalesced around the cause of saving the children in China. How did China's children become archetypal victims who ignited a new global humanitarian imagination? And who would prevail in the transnational contest to control the vast quantities of aid flowing into China on their behalf?

The Adoption Plan offers a new history of the rise of global humanitarianism that places the recipients, administrators, and critics of humanitarian aid in China at the center of the story. Analyzing how the "adoption plan" for international child sponsorship became one of the most popular fundraising strategies for humanitarian work in China and across the world, Jack Neubauer explores how the globalization of humanitarian aid was linked to new practices of global intimacy that enabled donors to build personal relationships with Chinese children across geographic and cultural divides. Drawing on hundreds of letters written by Chinese children to foreign sponsors and extensive research in Chinese archives, Neubauer shows how China's Nationalist and Communist parties mobilized the emotional bonds between children and sponsors to secure international support for their competing political projects. By the 1950s, child sponsorship and international adoption had become the most hotly contested humanitarian programs in Cold War East Asia.

Upending the conventional view of humanitarianism as a tool of Western influence, The Adoption Plan demonstrates that it was often the Chinese recipients of aid who were best able to control its material and ideological uses.

Review Quotes

Neubauer's research on the history of child sponsorship and adoption plans in twentieth-century China illuminates the unrivaled power of such activities for international humanitarian fundraising. By making extensive use of the letters that Chinese children and their Western sponsors wrote to each other, Neubauer also brings alive the human face and, with the rise of the Cold War, the tragic cost of these interactions.--Henrietta Harrison, University of Oxford

The Adoption Plan is an exceptionally well-crafted, multilayered study of China's central role in the birth of global humanitarianism. Neubauer shows how the "practices of global intimacy" associated with international child adoption forged a new kind of international humanitarianism that continues to thrive to this day throughout Asia and across much of the world.--Glen Peterson, University of British Columbia

Jack Neubauer's phenomenal study of child adoption and sponsorship in China proves that a "bottom-up" approach dramatizing the recipients and targets of Western aid and attention reshapes our understanding of modern humanitarianism. In doing so, The Adoption Plan goes beyond rectifying the omission of China from international histories of nongovernmental humanitarianism: it ushers in a rethinking of the phenomenon everywhere.--Samuel Moyn, author of Human Rights and the Uses of History

About the Author

Jack Neubauer is a historian of China and the modern world. He was previously an assistant professor of history at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.