‘Wan and Wistful Little waifs’: Settler Child Welfare Work in Shanghai, c. 1890–1939

Beginning with the story of three British siblings who were removed from their mother’s care and placed in orphanages in Shanghai in the 1920s, this article considers the experiences of the socially marginalised children of European settlers in Shanghai before the Second World War and the emergence of philanthropic and community responses to their plight. This analysis of the practice and ideologies of child welfare work, particularly that carried out by the Shanghai branch of the King’s Daughters’ Society, which was the most prominent Anglophone organisation engaged in welfare provision among the city’s foreign communities, arrives at two conclusions. Firstly, concerns about the predicament of ‘endangered’ children in Shanghai shaped the development of a particular conception of urban cosmopolitanism. Although this settler identity at times appealed to white solidarity, more often it emphasised multi-national communal bonds based on shared foreignness and long-term residence in the urban enclave of Shanghai’s International Settlement. Secondly, the perception of childhood mobility as culturally and politically dangerous increasingly influenced approaches to settler child welfare, which sought to support children and their families to become productive long-term members of the city’s foreign community through institutionalisation, subsidised education, and the provision of material aid.