Political Loyalty beyond the Family: Fostering Fictive Families for the Nationalist Party, the Chinese Nation, and US Allies, 1927–45

Max Weber blamed China’s backwardness, in part, on Chinese society’s adherence to “clan” mentalities, and the Republic’s founding father, Sun Yetsen, likewise claimed that Chinese were a “sheet of loose sand,” in need of greater political loyalty to the emerging nation-state. Drawing upon memoirs, archives, and government documents, this paper examines the use and employment of fictive kin terms among dependent children in new child welfare institutions in China under Nationalist Guomindang rule through the wartime period (1927-1945). I show that these fictive kin relationships moved across multiple scales: they organized orphans’ institutional care, legitimized nationalist elites’ relationships to the nation, and smoothed over the difficulties of accepting US aid in a nationalist context. Nationalist Party leaders promoted an expansion of family values alongside loyalty to party and nation in the lead-up to the war. For the Soong sisters, each married to a prominent member of the Chinese government (one to founding father of the Chinese Republic Sun Yatsen; another to Kong Xiangxi, the Minister of Industry who founded the National Child Welfare Association; and a third to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek), fictive family relationships became central to their projected identities as “national mothers.”

Fictive relationships also helped to cement Sino-American friendship and smooth the path for joint welfare efforts, especially for Chinese war orphans. Nationalist leaders encouraged welfare policies in part to persuade foreign powers to reevaluate the terms of the Unequal Treaties, signed at the end of the Opium Wars, which had granted semi-colonial treaty ports. US sponsors adopted fictive kin relationships for dependent children in the National Child Welfare Association. Through these partnerships, especially during the Allied war effort during World War II, Americans reversed Weberian-style condemnations of the Chinese family and sought to encourage Chinese patriotism and political alliances based on a modern style of family relationships.