Editors’ Note: Jack Neubauer discusses his new book, The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism, its reframing of the politics of humanitarian aid from the perspective of aid’s recipients, and what lessons that might hold for contemporary humanitarianism.

Since the dismantling of USAID in early 2025, there has been an outpouring of liberal support for foreign aid as a tool of American soft power. The grateful recipients of American aid around the world, the now-familiar argument goes, will be more inclined to support values and policies in line with U.S. interests. This liberal defense of aid as a tool of American foreign policy exists uneasily alongside longstanding leftist critiques of humanitarian aid as a tool of imperialism designed to make vulnerable populations dependent on American largesse—and therefore more likely to acquiesce to U.S. policy preferences. Yet whether they praise it as “soft power” or condemn it as “imperialism,” both liberal defenders and leftist detractors of aid programs appear to agree on the fundamental premise that—for better or worse—humanitarian aid is an effective tool of international influence.

But are they right?

Over the past several decades, historians have devoted considerable attention to analyzing the political uses of humanitarian aid. Written primarily by historians of Europe and the United States using the Western-language archives of major international aid organizations, these studies necessarily focus on the motivations and actions of the Western organizations that set out to save suffering populations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet historians have focused less on how the recipients of aid in the non-Western world reshaped humanitarian programs to advance their own political priorities. On one hand, scholars have justifiably criticized humanitarians past and present for failing to empower the recipients of their aid to define progress on their own terms. On the other hand, historians’ overwhelming focus on the providers rather than the recipients of aid risks reinforcing the impression that only the perspectives of the would-be rescuers matter.

My new book, The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism, reframes the politics of humanitarian aid by focusing on those who received help in addition to those who provided it. The Adoption Plan recounts the nearly two-hundred-year history of international efforts to save children in China. Western donors to child-saving projects in China regarded the programs they supported as a way to spread “Western” values among China’s children, whom they hoped would grow up to become the citizens of a democratic, Christian, and pro-Western China. Yet based on extensive research in Chinese archives, The Adoption Plan shows that the recipients of aid in China consistently reshaped humanitarian programs to serve their own political priorities. Challenging 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.

The “Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once” Problem

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a new form of global humanitarianism took shape around the cause of saving the children in China. Most scholars agree that humanitarianism has roots in the abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century, European empires had embraced an ideology of “imperial benevolence” that (at least in theory) recognized the obligation of colonial governments to alleviate the suffering of their subjects. Yet in practice, humanitarian appeals were typically confined within specific colonial circuits. British people donated to humanitarian causes in British colonies; French people donated to causes in French colonies, etc. The moral universe of early humanitarianism was not the world but the empire.

China, however, was never colonized by a single power but rather was exploited by many foreign powers at once. As a result, rather than the delimited ethic of colonial responsibility that informed child-saving projects in other colonial settings, early efforts to save the children in China were supported by a geographically dispersed network of donors who conceptualized their concern for Chinese children in global terms. By giving to children in China, donors signaled that, at least theoretically, they would give to suffering humanity anywhere on earth.

Yet the global rhetoric that humanitarian organizations used to fundraise on behalf of children in China was a double-edged sword. On one hand, their message of human sympathy and global community motivated people around the world to donate to Chinese children to whom they acknowledged no special connection or obligation. On the other hand, none of the reasons they offered to care about children in China were specific to children in China. They applied equally, for example, to children suffering during the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 or in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 in Japan—both events that inspired large international relief efforts. The rise of global humanitarianism greatly exacerbated the problem of the limited resources of potential donors. The amount of suffering in the world was too great, and it was impossible to aid everyone, everywhere, all at once.

Making Distant Strangers into Fictive Kin

When full-scale war between China and Japan broke out in 1937, causing a child refugee crisis on a scale unprecedented in Chinese history, overwhelmed Chinese relief institutions needed new ways to make the cause of saving Chinese children stand out within a newly competitive global marketplace for humanitarian resources and attention. In this context, Chinese child welfare organizations began experimenting with a fundraising strategy that became known as the “adoption plan” for international child sponsorship. Under the adoption plan, foreign “foster parents” could “adopt” individual Chinese children by paying for them to live in child welfare institutions in China while exchanging photographs, gifts, and translated letters that used familial terms of address. The adoption plan proved enormously successful as a fundraising tool in large part because it offered a solution to the “everyone, everywhere, all at once” problem. By cultivating a sense of personal obligation and fictive kinship ties across geographic and cultural divides, the adoption plan provided donors with a reason to give (and keep giving) to one specific child despite the near-infinite number of worthy causing vying for their attention. After WWII, child sponsorship became the most successful method for private humanitarian fundraising in China and across the world—and it remains a multibillion-dollar industry today.

The Adoption Plan as People’s Diplomacy

This intimate turn in global humanitarian giving also transformed its political possibilities. In the past, the recipients of humanitarian aid had few opportunities to communicate with distant benefactors. However, by crafting narratives of children’s lives, staging photographs, and coaching children on how to write letters, Chinese relief institutions funded by the adoption plan were newly empowered to shape the political uses of the aid they received. Founded in 1938, the National Association for Refugee Children (NARC), the largest child welfare organization in WWII-era China, made the adoption plan the centerpiece of its global fundraising efforts. A semiofficial institution led by the first lady of Nationalist China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the NARC used the adoption plan as an opportunity to circulate intimate narratives of Japanese cruelty to private citizens across the world—who, the Nationalists hoped, would in turn pressure their governments to support China in its fight against Japan. For example, a girl named Han wrote to her foster mother Karen in New Zealand, “I think about my home, which is still being trampled by the enemy in a city in the occupied area…The scent of the fields and gardens in my lovely hometown has now been replaced by the smoke and fire of war…I hate the Japanese bandits.” For China’s Nationalist government, the adoption plan offered an opportunity to make the Japanese occupation personal for foreign sponsors who received letters from their “own” adopted children describing how they had suffered at the hands of the Japanese.

After World War II, the Chinese Communists also embraced the adoption plan as a new form of “people’s diplomacy” that could attract material and ideological support for the Communist cause. In 1947, a left-leaning international child welfare organization called Foster Parents Plan for War Children (PLAN) partnered with a Chinese organization called the China Welfare Fund to create the PLAN China Branch, which worked to channel humanitarian funds to “progressive” child welfare institutions staffed by underground Communists. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PLAN China Branch argued that the adoption plan provided an opportunity to attract much-needed relief funds while mobilizing children to help spread positive narratives of the revolution abroad: “the construction of new China, the glorious achievements of the People’s Liberation Army, the contrast between the People’s Government and the government of the Nationalist reactionaries—all of these can serve as subjects for the children to report on.” The PLAN China Branch also recognized that children’s letters could only be politically effective if the children maintained affectionate relationships with foreign sponsors. In internal reports, the PLAN China Branch emphasized the need to train children to “use the heart to influence the mind” by writing letters that were “soft in tone but firm in substance.”

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Ultimately, however, China’s goal of making humanitarian aid serve the needs of the revolution crumbed against the hard realities of war. After the liberation of Shanghai in May 1949, many of the older boys at PLAN-supported institutions enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army. A boy named Gun-chun from Shanghai Boystown Orphanage was among them. In June 1949, he wrote a goodbye letter to his sponsors, an American family named the Macauleys, explaining his decision to join the army. In October 1950, approximately 14 months after he wrote that letter, China intervened in the Korean War and Gun-chun was deployed to the Korean Peninsula, where he found himself at war with the country of the people he called his foster parents. During the summer of 1951, as the Chinese army retreated north toward the 38th parallel, he was killed in a napalm attack. To the Macauleys, Gun-chun was a “foster son,” but to the U.S. warplanes dropping napalm bombs over Korea, he was still simply “the enemy.”

By the time Gun-chun met his fate in Korea, China had decided to prohibit all foreign humanitarian organizations from operating in China. Rather than transforming children into “people’s diplomats,” in the context of the Korean War Communist officials began to fear that the adoption plan would instead create a sizeable group of children emotionally and economically indebted to China’s military and ideological enemies—especially the United States. Ignoring their former support for the adoption plan as a tool of people’s diplomacy, Chinese Communist leaders belatedly embraced a more traditional Marxist argument that humanitarian aid to China had always been a “cloak” for a “reactionary political plot” to keep China subservient to its Western benefactors. For humanitarian organizations like PLAN and China’s Children Fund (now ChildFund International), which had attempted to accommodate their work to the demands of Chinese Communist authorities, being lambasted as agents of imperialism made it virtually impossible to avoid taking sides in the zero-sum politics of the new Cold War order. After they were forced out of China in 1951, these humanitarian organizations refocused their work on places like Japan and Korea, where they explicitly reconceptualized the adoption plan as a tool of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. The Chinese Communists who attacked global humanitarianism as a tool of Western imperialism had framed their argument as a historical critique. From the perspective of hindsight, however, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Past and Future of Humanitarian Aid in China

In many histories of humanitarianism, the recipients of aid in the non-Western world appear only as victims, either rescued or forsaken by the Western actors at the center of the story. Yet as the

history of international efforts to save children in China demonstrates, it was often the recipients of aid who were best able to shape its political meanings. From the Nationalist-affiliated NARC to the Communist-affiliated PLAN China Branch, Chinese relief organizations mobilized the emotional ties between Chinese children and foreign sponsors to cultivate support for their own political visions. And ultimately, it was the Chinese Communist critics of humanitarianism who forced international aid organizations to leave China and redistribute their resources according to the political geography of the Cold War.

As the United States appears to pull back on its provision of humanitarian aid, China has begun—albeit slowly and tentatively—to expand its own efforts to use aid as a tool of influence in regions such as Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If China’s own history is any guide, it may find that the recipients of its aid have other ideas.

-Jack Neubauer

Jack Neubauer is a historian of China and the modern world. He received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and completed the research and writing for his first book, The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism, while an assistant professor in the Department of History at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is currently a policy analyst at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.