电报与晚清时期的灾害赈防

The Telegraph and the Famine of Prevention and Relief in the Late Qing Dynasty

在晚清最后三十余年中,中国逐步建立起基本覆盖全国的电报网,并不断将之施用于自然灾害的赈济与防控,使得传统的救灾防灾手段有了重要创新,初步具备近代特质。故电报的引入,不仅提高了灾害赈防的时效性,而且还具有转折意义。然就斯时全国整体言,电报在救灾防灾中的实际使用区域仍较有限,因而其所发挥的作用与影响亦不可高估。

The telegraph has once impelled enormously to make Western economy and society more pros perous and progressive as important modern science and technology. Since the 1880s, China had also started to construct the telegram in large scale, and employed it unceasingly to relieve and prevent the famine. This improved the Chinese traditional method to relieve and prevent the famine, and made it have some modern character. But the influence of the telegraph in the famine of prevention and relief in the late Qing dynasty cannot have been valued highly as far as all over the country then.