Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia : Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century

A collection exploring public health policies and implementation in Chinese regions of East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present; many of the contributors are based in Taiwan. This collection expands the history of colonial medicine and public health by exploring efforts to overcome disease and improve human health in Chinese regions of East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors consider the science and politics of public health policymaking and implementation in Taiwan, Manchuria, Hong Kong, and the Yangzi River delta, focusing mostly on towns and villages rather than cities. Whether discussing the resistance of lay midwives in colonial Taiwan to the Japanese campaign to replace them with experts in “scientific motherhood” or the reaction of British colonists in Shanghai to Chinese diet and health regimes, they illuminate the effects of foreign interventions and influences on particular situations and localities. They discuss responses to epidemics from the plague in early-twentieth-century Manchuria to SARS in southern China, Singapore, and Taiwan, but they also emphasize that public health is not just about epidemic crises. As essays on marsh drainage in Taiwan, the enforcement of sanitary ordinances in Shanghai, and vaccination drives in Manchuria show, throughout the twentieth century public health bureaucracies have primarily been engaged in the mundane activities of education, prevention, and monitoring. Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Charlotte Furth, Marta E. Hanson, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Angela Ki Che Leung, Shang-Jen Li, Yushang Li, Yi-Ping Lin, Shiyung Liu, Ruth Rogaski, Yen-Fen Tseng, Chia-ling Wu, Xinzhong Yu Introduction: hygienic modernity in Chinese East Asia / Charlotte Furth -- The evolution of the idea of chuanran contagion in Imperial China / Angela Ki Che Leung -- The treatment of night soil and waste in modern China / Yu Xinzhong -- Sovereignty and the microscope : constituting notifiable infectious disease and containing the Manchurian plague (1910-11) / Sean Hsiang-lin Lei -- Eating well in China : diet and hygiene in nineteenth-century treaty ports -- Shang-jen Li -- Vampires in plagueland : the multiple meanings of Weisheng in Manchuria / Ruth Rogaski -- Have someone cut the umbilical cord : women's birthing networks, knowledge and skills in colonial Taiwan, / Wu Chia-Ling -- A forgotten war : malaria eradication in Taiwan, 1905-65 / Lin Yi-ping and Liu Shiyung -- The elimination of schistosomiasis in Jiaxing and Haining counties, 1948-58 : public health as political movement / Li Yushang -- Conceptual blind spots, media blindfolds : the case of SARS and traditional Chinese medicine / Marta E. Hanson -- Governing germs from outside and within borders : controlling 2003 SARS risk in Taiwan / Tseng Yen-fen and Wu Chia-Ling -- Afterword : biomedicine in Chinese East Asia : from semicolonial to postcolonial / Warwick Anderson -- Timeline. Examines the intersections of power, culture and science that went into the struggle to overcome disease and improve people's health in Chinese regions of 20th century East Asia