China Hands and Aid Workers: The UNRRA China staff database

This paper provides a preliminary report on the extent to which the foreign staff of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) China Office (1944-47) drew on men and women with previous experience of living and working in China. As UNRRA’s single largest operation, the China aid was distributed through a parallel structure of UNRRA and a newly created Chinese state agency, the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRRA). We currently have an anecdotal understanding that it drew significantly from those with experience of working in the infrastructure of the treaty port establishment in China (which was formally abolished in the 1943 UK-China and US-China new ‘friendship’ treaties), but no detailed account. Drawing on datasets of personnel employed in the Chinese Maritime Customs, municipal administrations, interned Allied nationals, and a new dataset of CNRRA staff, this essay puts this to the test. Scholars of the history of humanitarianism have recently turned to explore the colonial roots of international aid organisations, and this study will draw on and contribute to that literature, seeking to understand how former ‘China hands’, elites and non-elites, refashioned themselves to find opportunities in the new organisations of the postwar, and post-treaty world.