Chieko Nakajima. Body, Society, and Nation: The Creation of Public Health and Urban Culture in Shanghai.

Abstract

Shanghai’s population grew from one to five million over the first four decades of the twentieth century. Many of its new residents lived in crowded shantytowns without access to clean water. As documented in fascinating detail in Christian Henriot’s Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai (2016), an appalling number of them, young and old, fell ill and died every year. For concerned citizens and nation builders, this was of course a serious problem. In Body, Society, and Nation, Chieko Nakajima explores how and why Shanghai’s political, social, and commercial elites attempted to improve sanitary conditions in the city, creating new institutions, launching public health campaigns, and promoting consumer products for personal hygiene. She argues that such activities were inspired by a global public health movement but also reflected local customs and concerns. Good sanitation was seen as indispensable by nationalists because of the need for a healthy supply of industrial workers and soldiers. A clean, well-ordered city would also refute the humiliating taunts of the foreign rulers of Shanghai’s wealthiest districts: that native Chinese administration was incompetent, content to preside over squalor. Embedded in the new public health efforts, though, were older medical and cultural conceptions and practices. Nakajima shows how an initiative such as the New Life Movement, launched in 1934, connected different strands of thinking about public health and adopted techniques of mobilization developed in other contexts. Across the first half of the twentieth century, the focus of health initiatives gradually shifted from environmental conditions (clean streets and water) to social behavior (acceptance of inoculation and rejection of sloth and vice).