December 11 in History

On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly of the newly formed United Nations created the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund, known by its acronym UNICEF. It was set up to bring food, clothing, and health care to children whose lives had been shattered by the Second World War. Over the following decades it grew from a temporary relief body into a permanent agency working in well over a hundred countries, and it has become one of the best-known humanitarian organizations in the world.

In December 2001, China formally became a member of the World Trade Organization, ending a negotiation that had lasted about fifteen years. Membership bound the world's most populous country to a common set of trade rules and gave its exporters more secure access to foreign markets. It is widely seen as one of the pivotal moments in the economic globalization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.