The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism – A Book Talk by Jack Neubauer

Speaker: Jack Neubauer, historian and author

Moderator: Eugenia Lean, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures; Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Columbia University

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 shows 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. 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.

Speaker’s Bio: Jack Neubauer is a historian of China and the modern world. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and completed the research and writing for The Adoption Plan during four years as an assistant professor in the Department of History at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is currently a policy analyst focusing on security and foreign affairs at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Registration:

• To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
• To attend this event online, please register HERE.