Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2014-03-18 02:15 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2014-03-18 02:15 pm
Entry tags:
Book review: Hygienic Modernity
Bibliographic Data: Rogaski, Ruth. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Main Argument: "…this study considers the century-long process of how health and disease emerged as a discursive center of Chinese deficiency under conditions of imperialism and traces specific projects of 'awakening' the Chinese nation, race, and body to a state of corporal modernity" (3). This emergence of 'hygienic modernity' was a central part of China's experience of imperialism.
Historiographical Engagement: Warwick Anderson, Foucault, David Arnold, Gyan Prakash, Roy Porter
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "…This study illuminates how weisheng transformed a city, and how it became a central term through which Chinese elites 'named the conditions of their existence' under foreign imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (1). It does this through a local history of Tianjin, which was a treaty port under as many as ten different jurisdictions. This local, urban, and translation history involved both "colonizing the body" and "contesting colonial hegemony" in Tianjin, although over time there was nonetheless a decisive shift to understanding China as deficient in weisheng. Rogaski terms Tianjin a "hyper colony" because it was subject to so many different imperial powers, who operated under the scrutiny of each other as well. She also argues that treaty-ports are all unalike, happy or not, and that "semi colonialism" is an inadequate term to capture the Chinese experience of imperialism: "There are distinct differences in the intensity, power, and violence of the foreign presence over time and from place to place" (13). She uses the term "weisheng" both because the term "hygiene" has shifted in English over the past 200 years, and because "weisheng" came to mean a multiplicity of things, in an uncanny way often acting as a fairly good translation for "bio-power."
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the discourse on weisheng in the late imperial period and concludes that "Weisheng in late imperial China was the product of wealthy, cosmologically confident society whose primary anxiety was that it possessed too much" (46). "…in general, paths to guarding life in late imperial China were diffuse, intertwined with food culture, projected through aphorisms about time and place, embedded in herbal formulas, hinted at through beliefs about health and sex" (47).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Tianjin on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans in a holistic fashion, including "how people in Tianjin explained disease, sought to preserve health in daily life as individuals, and came together as a community to eliminate threats to health in the urban environment" and concludes that "strategies for guarding life in Heaven's Ford were to a considerable degree effective in preserving health" (50, 51).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples European and Chinese conceptions of disease causation and prevention did not exhibit a "great divergence" in the mid-19thC, contrary to Europeans' self-congratulatory assertions otherwise: "What did differ was the political and social organization of disease prevention, and this very recent divergence fueled the most contentious medical encounters between Chinese and Europeans at midcentury" (77). In Rogaski's view, on the British side, "trial and error in the laboratories of the city and the empire produced meaningful divergences between Europe and China that emerged later in the nineteenth century, divergences that would fuel the creation of a discourse of Chinese deficiency centered on hygiene" (ibid). The great divergence between Great Britain and the Great Qing at midcentury was political rather than medical, specifically the politics of public sanitation that were beginning to play out in Great Britain as a consequence of reformers' efforts and imperial wars. Although medical traditions between China and Britain at this point were in fact quite similar, very few British even acknowledged the existence of Chinese medical traditions, and the ability to acknowledge their healthful practices while critiquing their lack of public hygiene became fully untenable by the 20thC.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the first round of translating weisheng in treaty-port China, when such texts--translated from the English in Shanghai--began to appear in Tianjin in the 1880s. In these texts, "the basic concepts associated with weisheng began to shift away from an entirely Chinese context and moved to embrace an authority generated by the laboratories of Europe" (104). Moreover, they were focused on "scientific hygiene" rather than on "sanitary science." This was a complex moment in Chinese colonial history, in which Western technological superiority was readily acknowledged but Western medicine was contested as occasionally insightful but not categorically superior, and in which foreign settlement governments were unable to colonize the body or even to enforce the separation of Chinese and whites in spaces such as public parks in concessions. Western "hygienic modernity" had not yet come to China.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the transformation of "eisei" in Meiji Japan, whence "weisheng" was first packaged as "hygienic modernity," part of a total package that "was a key link in the creation of a wealthy and powerful nation" through the creation of a healthy national body (137). The appetite for embracing eisai/weisheng was distinctly divergent among national elites in in Japan and China; the former was focused on public health and the national body, while the latter focused on the healthy choices of individuals. By the turn of the 20thC, eisai in Japan encompassed public health and sanitation as well as the inculcation of healthy habits in the populace as members of the national body, a totality that did not yet exist in China.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at hygienic modernity in the occupation of Tianjin from 1900-02, during and after the Boxer Rebellion, which remains a potent name to conjure with in contemporary China: "The Boxers have come to symbolize the deficiencies of China’s culture, while the humiliations China suffered at the hands of foreign armies in 1900 serve as a reminder of what might happen if China’s culture is not transformed" (166). Tianjin felt the force of the Boxer Rebellion most heavily of Chinese cities, as it was administered by an international colonial administration for two years and its reversion to China was conditional upon the Qing creating a bureau of weisheng, which was now "hygienic modernity:" "Personal hygiene and public health administration had became markers of civilization and modernity in the context of high imperialism" (167). It is important to note that this was in many ways a violent imposition, and that Tianjin elites embraced hygienic modernity even as it was "inextricably entwined with the violence of imperialism" because it allowed them to set themselves apart from the Chinese peasantry and their various stigmata (168). However, this embrace involved attempts to mark this new weisheng as indigenous, by adopting a model from Asia (i.e. Japan), and by attempting to place Chinese in positions of authority. At the same time, weisheng was also configured in a new discourse of/as Chinese deficiency, which allowed urban elites to distance themselves from the spatially distant, lacking peasantry of the hinterland.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the role of weisheng in the transformation of Chinese urban space in the early 20thC. Because Tianjin was divided between empires, ironically, hygienic modernity, which was supposed to be public, became almost entirely private. Thus in some quarters water and waste were rendered unseen (another marker of civilization), while water and night-soil carriers--the Dark Drifters--remained in Tianjin as a whole into the 1950s. In most of the city beyond the British Settlement (unsurprisingly), maintaining the borders between 卫生／不卫生 required constant inflows of capital and labor to maintain and police, and were always porous.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at weisheng and the desire for modernity, which was always expressed according to a standard that was "a distant and idealized West/Japan, where all was robust and free of germs" (226). The turn to weisheng by various groups in the 1920s and 1930s was motivated by a desire to find "a solution to the problems of China's 20thC predicament of high mortality rates, frequent epidemics, and imperialist incursions," and although how this was to be accomplished was much debated, weisheng was both "the center of the predicament and the essence of escape" (250). Thus, "the control of germs and the control of populations had become the model for national health and national sovereignty. That foreign regimes seemed to be so much more proficient at controlling germs— in the West, and in Japan— remained a dominant element in the Chinese elite’s desire for hygienic modernity" (253).
Chapter 9: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the imposition of hygienic modernity after the Japanese occupation of Tianjin from 1937-45. Rogaski sums it up thus:
Chapter 10: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign in the early 1950s, which Rogaski views "as both a continuation and a culmination of the history of weisheng in urban China" (286), which was nontelyesless "an extreme version of the hygienic modernity that had gone before" because of how many more people actually did weisheng in this campaign, "in the name of national defense and the pursuit of modernity" (286, 287). The idea was that "achieving this national health would in turn guarantee the status and sovereignty of the nation against the threat of foreign imperialism" (298). Indeed, by the time of this campaign, governmental intervention in the name of public health was so normalized as to seem a marker of governmental legitimacy.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples
Critical assessment: This is an excellent and influential book, for good reason. I particularly like the way she refuses to de-emphasize violence, and the ways in which she points out the unevenness of regimes of colonial control and the adoption/contestation of different aspects of modernity.
Further reading: Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Larissa Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images
Meta notes: If biopower is the way we live now, why can't the United States compel its citizens to get their childhood vaccinations?
Main Argument: "…this study considers the century-long process of how health and disease emerged as a discursive center of Chinese deficiency under conditions of imperialism and traces specific projects of 'awakening' the Chinese nation, race, and body to a state of corporal modernity" (3). This emergence of 'hygienic modernity' was a central part of China's experience of imperialism.
Historiographical Engagement: Warwick Anderson, Foucault, David Arnold, Gyan Prakash, Roy Porter
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "…This study illuminates how weisheng transformed a city, and how it became a central term through which Chinese elites 'named the conditions of their existence' under foreign imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (1). It does this through a local history of Tianjin, which was a treaty port under as many as ten different jurisdictions. This local, urban, and translation history involved both "colonizing the body" and "contesting colonial hegemony" in Tianjin, although over time there was nonetheless a decisive shift to understanding China as deficient in weisheng. Rogaski terms Tianjin a "hyper colony" because it was subject to so many different imperial powers, who operated under the scrutiny of each other as well. She also argues that treaty-ports are all unalike, happy or not, and that "semi colonialism" is an inadequate term to capture the Chinese experience of imperialism: "There are distinct differences in the intensity, power, and violence of the foreign presence over time and from place to place" (13). She uses the term "weisheng" both because the term "hygiene" has shifted in English over the past 200 years, and because "weisheng" came to mean a multiplicity of things, in an uncanny way often acting as a fairly good translation for "bio-power."
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the discourse on weisheng in the late imperial period and concludes that "Weisheng in late imperial China was the product of wealthy, cosmologically confident society whose primary anxiety was that it possessed too much" (46). "…in general, paths to guarding life in late imperial China were diffuse, intertwined with food culture, projected through aphorisms about time and place, embedded in herbal formulas, hinted at through beliefs about health and sex" (47).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Tianjin on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans in a holistic fashion, including "how people in Tianjin explained disease, sought to preserve health in daily life as individuals, and came together as a community to eliminate threats to health in the urban environment" and concludes that "strategies for guarding life in Heaven's Ford were to a considerable degree effective in preserving health" (50, 51).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples European and Chinese conceptions of disease causation and prevention did not exhibit a "great divergence" in the mid-19thC, contrary to Europeans' self-congratulatory assertions otherwise: "What did differ was the political and social organization of disease prevention, and this very recent divergence fueled the most contentious medical encounters between Chinese and Europeans at midcentury" (77). In Rogaski's view, on the British side, "trial and error in the laboratories of the city and the empire produced meaningful divergences between Europe and China that emerged later in the nineteenth century, divergences that would fuel the creation of a discourse of Chinese deficiency centered on hygiene" (ibid). The great divergence between Great Britain and the Great Qing at midcentury was political rather than medical, specifically the politics of public sanitation that were beginning to play out in Great Britain as a consequence of reformers' efforts and imperial wars. Although medical traditions between China and Britain at this point were in fact quite similar, very few British even acknowledged the existence of Chinese medical traditions, and the ability to acknowledge their healthful practices while critiquing their lack of public hygiene became fully untenable by the 20thC.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the first round of translating weisheng in treaty-port China, when such texts--translated from the English in Shanghai--began to appear in Tianjin in the 1880s. In these texts, "the basic concepts associated with weisheng began to shift away from an entirely Chinese context and moved to embrace an authority generated by the laboratories of Europe" (104). Moreover, they were focused on "scientific hygiene" rather than on "sanitary science." This was a complex moment in Chinese colonial history, in which Western technological superiority was readily acknowledged but Western medicine was contested as occasionally insightful but not categorically superior, and in which foreign settlement governments were unable to colonize the body or even to enforce the separation of Chinese and whites in spaces such as public parks in concessions. Western "hygienic modernity" had not yet come to China.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the transformation of "eisei" in Meiji Japan, whence "weisheng" was first packaged as "hygienic modernity," part of a total package that "was a key link in the creation of a wealthy and powerful nation" through the creation of a healthy national body (137). The appetite for embracing eisai/weisheng was distinctly divergent among national elites in in Japan and China; the former was focused on public health and the national body, while the latter focused on the healthy choices of individuals. By the turn of the 20thC, eisai in Japan encompassed public health and sanitation as well as the inculcation of healthy habits in the populace as members of the national body, a totality that did not yet exist in China.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at hygienic modernity in the occupation of Tianjin from 1900-02, during and after the Boxer Rebellion, which remains a potent name to conjure with in contemporary China: "The Boxers have come to symbolize the deficiencies of China’s culture, while the humiliations China suffered at the hands of foreign armies in 1900 serve as a reminder of what might happen if China’s culture is not transformed" (166). Tianjin felt the force of the Boxer Rebellion most heavily of Chinese cities, as it was administered by an international colonial administration for two years and its reversion to China was conditional upon the Qing creating a bureau of weisheng, which was now "hygienic modernity:" "Personal hygiene and public health administration had became markers of civilization and modernity in the context of high imperialism" (167). It is important to note that this was in many ways a violent imposition, and that Tianjin elites embraced hygienic modernity even as it was "inextricably entwined with the violence of imperialism" because it allowed them to set themselves apart from the Chinese peasantry and their various stigmata (168). However, this embrace involved attempts to mark this new weisheng as indigenous, by adopting a model from Asia (i.e. Japan), and by attempting to place Chinese in positions of authority. At the same time, weisheng was also configured in a new discourse of/as Chinese deficiency, which allowed urban elites to distance themselves from the spatially distant, lacking peasantry of the hinterland.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the role of weisheng in the transformation of Chinese urban space in the early 20thC. Because Tianjin was divided between empires, ironically, hygienic modernity, which was supposed to be public, became almost entirely private. Thus in some quarters water and waste were rendered unseen (another marker of civilization), while water and night-soil carriers--the Dark Drifters--remained in Tianjin as a whole into the 1950s. In most of the city beyond the British Settlement (unsurprisingly), maintaining the borders between 卫生／不卫生 required constant inflows of capital and labor to maintain and police, and were always porous.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at weisheng and the desire for modernity, which was always expressed according to a standard that was "a distant and idealized West/Japan, where all was robust and free of germs" (226). The turn to weisheng by various groups in the 1920s and 1930s was motivated by a desire to find "a solution to the problems of China's 20thC predicament of high mortality rates, frequent epidemics, and imperialist incursions," and although how this was to be accomplished was much debated, weisheng was both "the center of the predicament and the essence of escape" (250). Thus, "the control of germs and the control of populations had become the model for national health and national sovereignty. That foreign regimes seemed to be so much more proficient at controlling germs— in the West, and in Japan— remained a dominant element in the Chinese elite’s desire for hygienic modernity" (253).
Chapter 9: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the imposition of hygienic modernity after the Japanese occupation of Tianjin from 1937-45. Rogaski sums it up thus:
Although powers of inspection and the resources for vaccination were desired by health administrators since the turn of the century, the enforcement of such a sanitary regime during the occupation instead represented the highest degree of convergence between hygienic modernity and the specter of Chinese victimhood at the hands of imperialism. The management of germs at gunpoint, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the health of the Chinese people, coincided (in time, if not in location) with the use of germs as weapons in a war against them. Rumors that injections given by white-coated doctors caused, rather than prevented, disease was a common response to the role of the needle in modern biomedicine throughout the world. 74 Only in China during the 1930s and 1940s were such fears justified by the very real existence of an extensive enemy germ warfare program. During the Japanese occupation, the role of weisheng as a marker of inherent Chinese deficiency turned on the pivot of China as victim of violent imperialism. It was a moment that would establish weisheng as a potent basis for Chinese resistance against imperialism after the treaty ports had ceased to exist. (284)
Chapter 10: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign in the early 1950s, which Rogaski views "as both a continuation and a culmination of the history of weisheng in urban China" (286), which was nontelyesless "an extreme version of the hygienic modernity that had gone before" because of how many more people actually did weisheng in this campaign, "in the name of national defense and the pursuit of modernity" (286, 287). The idea was that "achieving this national health would in turn guarantee the status and sovereignty of the nation against the threat of foreign imperialism" (298). Indeed, by the time of this campaign, governmental intervention in the name of public health was so normalized as to seem a marker of governmental legitimacy.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples
Throughout the twentieth century, weisheng became an instrumental discourse informing the Chinese elite’s vision of a modern ideal, a vehicle through which they hoped state, society, and the individual would be transformed. As grasped by Meiji bureaucrats, late Qing reformers, and Guomindang modernizers, weisheng centered concerns of national sovereignty, institutional discipline, and government administration on the site of the body. In an uncanny way, the single modern Chinese term weisheng encompasses what Foucault called “ biopower,” a series of techniques through which the state undertakes the administration of life, and “governmentality,” the idea that individuals internalize disciplinary regimes and thus harmonize their own behaviors with the goals of the state. (300)She concludes that the discourse of Western superiority and Chinese deficiency was centered around weisheng, and notes that Japan played an important mediating role in the elite Chinese adoption of modernity.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent and influential book, for good reason. I particularly like the way she refuses to de-emphasize violence, and the ways in which she points out the unevenness of regimes of colonial control and the adoption/contestation of different aspects of modernity.
Further reading: Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Larissa Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images
Meta notes: If biopower is the way we live now, why can't the United States compel its citizens to get their childhood vaccinations?
no subject