Organizer: Wennan Liu, University of California, Berkeley
Chair and Discussant: Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University
During the Republican period, China underwent a transition from empire to
modern nation-state. At the same time, the Chinese people shifted from being
subjects of an empire to citizens of the nation. Advancements in science and
technology accompanied and propelled this shift, providing new perceptions and
definitions of what it meant to be human, not only in the abstract sense, but
also in concrete, quotidian terms as well.
Drawing on papers that consider issues in business,
social, cultural, and political history, this panel highlights the importance
of shifting definitions and perceptions of the individual body in studies of
Chinese modernization. Above all, the panel explores the ways by which individual
bodies were redefined so as to help legitimize the power of the state, facilitate
the governance over people, and improve individuals’ well-being in the
Republican period.
This panel emphasizes “body” in order to illustrate the essential
role of biological and statistical knowledge in the development of modern governance
in Republican China. Papers probe the line between the intimate sphere of the
individual body, and the public space in which the body found itself under the
surveillance of the state. In other words, we seek to delineate the multiple
boundaries drawn between the individual body and the “social body” in
Republican China.
This panel challenges the “totalitarian”, state-dominated image
of Republican China, especially the Nanjing decade (1927-37), and introduces
a historical vision of a society constituted by individuals with greater
self-consciousness, agency, and mobility.
Chieko Nakajima, Assumption College
For people in Republican Shanghai, “good health” did not simply
mean personal well-being. It not only represented national and racial strength
but also was a marker of civilized lifestyle and a significant outcome of modern
medical science. Focusing on the Shanghai merchants who manufactured and sold
drugs and personal hygiene items, this paper examines how the idea of health
became an integral part of Shanghai’s commercial culture and how Shanghai
merchants changed consumers’ consciousness of and attitudes toward health
and hygiene.
While doctors, intellectuals, and administrators in Shanghai believed that
healthy individuals and clean environment were important assets to a modern
nation, these merchants realized that this emphasis on health and cleanliness
could add market value to their goods labeled as “healthful”. They
encouraged Shanghai residents to take pills to promote well-being, to use
soap to clean their bodies and clothes, and to use proper pesticides to kill
vermin. Through advertisements and sales, they were promoting not only their
goods, but also the ideals of physical well-being and bodily cleanliness.
This study argues that health and hygiene were made handy, accessible, and
affordable through commodification. Shanghai merchants were doing business,
so they placed “healthful goods” within the reach of consumers and
had every incentive to change people’s everyday habits to create potential
consumers. By placing commodities, merchants, and consumers at the center
of the history of health and hygiene, this project hopes to demonstrate how
commercialism can change people's lifestyles and mentalities.
Liping Bu, Alma College
Systemic collecting of vital public health statistics of the Chinese population
began when the Peking Union Medical College created a Department of Public Health
and Hygiene to train Chinese public health professionals and administrators.
Students and staff of PUMC registered each birth and death in the ward of Peiping
First Health Demonstration Station, investigated the causes of diseases and
deaths, tallied the numbers, categorized them in charts, analyzed them with
scientific medical knowledge, and published the findings. For the students and
health professionals, collecting public health statistics was an important part
of the training and services of modern medicine; for the Chinese residents in
the community, it was a serious breach of their private lives to poke around
who was born and who died and what they ate and defecated. Births and deaths
were private matters of the family according to the customs of the traditional
society, and there was little public registration of births and deaths. Drawing
on archival data from China and the U.S., this paper examines how statistical
analysis of health and diseases as a modern force of scientific medicine invaded
private lives and how local residents coped with the transition from traditional
way of private life to modern investigation of diseases and health during the
1920s-1930s.
Wennan Liu, University of California, Berkeley
This paper examines how and why the anti-cigarette campaign in Zhejiang portrayed
cigarette smoking as a social vice during the New Life Movement. By analyzing
the discourses used in the anti-smoking propaganda, this paper illustrates the
efforts of the Nationalist official language to integrate individuals to a social
body and reshape individuals to serve the purposes of the nation-state.
Ever since cigarettes were introduced into China in the early 20th century,
numerous advertisements of cigarettes had created the public image of cigarette
smoking as a legitimate personal habit demonstrating status and taste. However,
in the New Life Movement initiated in February 1934, the guideline of this movement
identified cigarette smoking as a bad habit to be corrected immediately. As
an implementation of the central New Life Movement, the anti-cigarette campaign
in Zhejiang did not adopt its moralistic tone, but resorted to the hygienic,
economic, and nationalist reasons to appeal people to quit cigarette smoking.
Grounded on modern medical knowledge and statistical numbers, the anti-cigarette
discourses in this campaign were aimed not only at persuading people from this
addiction, but also at establishing a new understanding of sociality among individuals.
I argue that these anti-cigarette discourses framed individuality in the
context of society and imbued people with sense of citizenship. This new development
of public language in Republican China indicated that the cultural and social
construction of legitimate governance over the individual body played an important,
but usually neglected, role in the process of state-building.
Federica Ferlanti, University of Oxford
This paper intends to throw light on the functioning of the New Life Movement
in Jiangxi province and its contribution in shaping citizenship and national
identity. The analysis will show that in Jiangxi the Movement was aimed at
achieving a range of goals in health and hygiene, education, and political mobilization
through the creation of new mass organizations. By focusing on the Nationalists’ concern
over the issue of public health and hygiene within the New Life Movement (NLM),
I will argue that the Nationalist government supported the “individualization” of
the body by promoting the adoption of hygienic standards and routines but channeled
it through the collective framework of the NLM as to maintain control over the “political
body” and, as a result, over society.
This paper places the campaign within the state-building process pursued
by the Nationalist government between 1927 and 1937 and tries to emancipate
it from the logic of “failure” versus “success” for
understanding this complex and versatile campaign. It argues that although “results” were
limited in comparison to the fairly utopian goals set by the Nationalists, the
NLM condenses and epitomizes the policies implemented by the Nationalist government,
which contemporary scholarship on modern China has aptly and accurately re-evaluated.
The analysis of how the NLM evolved in specific places, at specific times, is
important because it provides a novel perspective on policy-making, state-building,
and society’s response in Nationalist China.
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