Shanghai dolls

[Randy W]

When a deadly famine struck China in the early 1960s, Shanghai evacuated thousands of children to remote herding communities in Inner Mongolia. Locals here have a name for people like Sun: Shanghai dolls. They are an entire generation of children who grew up in the shadow of one of the worst disasters in China’s modern history: the Great Famine.

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Shanghai’s Forgotten Children
When a deadly famine struck China in the early 1960s, the city evacuated thousands of children to remote herding communities in Inner Mongolia. Six decades later, they’re still there.

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Locals here have a name for people like Sun: Shanghai dolls. They are an entire generation of children who grew up in the shadow of one of the worst disasters in China’s modern history: the Great Famine.

In the early 1960s, thousands of babies arrived — pale, frail, and emaciated — in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. They had been sent from faraway Shanghai, abandoned by starving families who were no longer able to take care of them.

The nation had experienced a succession of disastrous harvests from 1959, the result of a series of natural disasters and the impact of a collectivization campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. What followed was unspeakable horror, as mass starvation took hold in large parts of the country.

China’s densely populated eastern coastline was hit hard by the famine. By 1961, tens of thousands of babies had arrived in Shanghai from the surrounding countryside. Many were orphans; others were abandoned by desperate families who hoped there might be enough food in the city to feed the children. 

They were mistaken. Despite being one of China’s most affluent cities, Shanghai was unable to provide for all the infants. The central government was forced to intervene, arranging urgent talks and pushing officials in northern China, which had been spared the worst effects of the famine, to provide emergency assistance.

Ulanhu, the founding chairman of Inner Mongolia, was one of the main power brokers during these negotiations. Shanghai asked Inner Mongolia — which has a huge dairy industry due to its rich pasturelands — to send emergency supplies of milk powder to feed the babies. Instead, Ulanhu offered to provide some of the children with refuge.

 . . .

The relocation process was often chaotic. In some cases, trains filled with orphans chugged across northern China until they found a place willing to take them in. Some children ended up as far away as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which borders Central Asia.

No records were kept of where the children had originally come from — or even of the children’s names. To this day, many have never been able to find their birth families.

 

A nurse entertains a group of children at a nursery in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 1960s. Xinhua