Republic Of Zhejiang Province (1912-1937), Famine Relief

Famine has constantly occurred in Zhejiang since ancient times. Since the foundation of Republic of China, because of the instable political solution, social economic slumped, famine in Zhejiang province occurred more frequently year after year, the extent of disaster aggravated continuously, and catastrophe happened constantly, the most representative is the drought in 1934. Based on the experience accumulated by dealing with the disaster, the Government of the Republic of China established many agencies and promulgated related legal files to relieve the people in the disaster area, which further perfected and improved the system of treating the disaster and famine problems, but when it comes to the actual actions, it always got half the result with twice the effort, because of the hollow finance, the deviation of the government's focus, the corruption of the officialism. On the Republic of China's Zhejiang region, facing continuous famine, Zhejiang provincial government adopted many positive steps and some modern relieving measure under the atmosphere of modernizing of the society. Although because of such restrictions factors as economic condition, ideology and so on ,the relieves of Zhejiang finally have not been able to achieve to the full effect, to some extent, which still reduced the losses caused by the famine and eased social conflicts caused by the famine. In addition, since the Republic of China's foundation, the sense of ownership in the upper and middle class has awakened during the sectors of the community and at the same time, the power of private sector in Zhejiang has grown because of the economic development in this area, thus, under the impetus of the times these people devoted to relief activities and increasingly occupied a major position. Power of the private sector's expansion with the application of new method for disaster relief not only injected fresh blood to relief work in Republic of China, but also promoted modernization process of of disaster relief in china.