Book Project: Empire of Hygiene: The Quarantine Service of the Chinese Maritime Customs, 1873-1945.”

Journal Article projects:

  1. “Contesting Manchukuo as A Space/Place: The Art of Resistance and Japanese Thought Control during the Anti-Japanese War”
  2. “Networks and Communication of Disease Control in Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949”
  3. “Renaissance versus Revolution Across the Taiwan Straits: Nation-Building and Science/Technology in the 1960s-1970s.”

 

Book Project

"Empire of Hygiene: The Quarantine Service of the Chinese Maritime Customs, 1873-1945" 

My long term book project is titled Empire of Hygiene: The Quarantine Service of the Chinese Maritime Customs, 1873-1945.” This book project explores the historical development of quarantine service within the institution of Chinese Maritime Customs, which has been understudied in both fields of public health history and maritime history in modern China. Hence, this case study serves as an integrated approach to understand two genealogies of the public health history and the governmental-political history of geo-body in modern China. 

In additional to this book project, during my stay at IIAS in 2014-15, I have three journal article projects.
 

Three Journal Article Projects

"Contesting Manchukuo as A Space/Place: The Art of Resistance and Japanese Thought Control during the Anti-Japanese War”

First, “Contesting Manchukuo as A Space/Place: The Art of Resistance and Japanese Thought Control during the Anti-Japanese War” explores the Chinese youth’s anti-Japanese activities in Manuchukuo, based on the materials donated by the renowned Chinese novelist Ji Gang (紀綱). Ji Gang participated in these activities under-cover as a medical student and recorded 90% of these activities in his well-received non-fiction book Rolling Liao River (Gungun liaohe 滾滾遼河). Special focus will be placed on the Japanese secret police’s reports, donated by Ji Gang to the Tsing Hua University Library, that analyze the anti-Japanese content of Chinese literary works. These reports can be described as hidden transcripts in terms of James C. Scott’s definition. However, Scott’s work on domination and resistance is framed within the binary dichotomy of dominator/dominated. This article will explore the multi-sided contention in Manchukuo involving interactions among the Japanese, Manchus, Han, Nationalists, and Communists through their art performances and literary writings. Some of this research outcome will be presented at the 2015 Workshop of “Governance and Challenges in China’s Peripheries and Ecology” to be organized by myself and held at IIAS on May 28-29.

“Networks and Communication of Disease Control in Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949.”

The second project is “Networks and Communication of Disease Control in Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949.” The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was founded in 1854, with the help of foreign merchants and the American, British and French consuls, in order to collect customs duties in five treaty ports including Shanghai, Ningpo, Fuzhou, Xiamen and Guangzhou initially opened under the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842. The CMCS had recruited by 1870 about 20 medical officers, such as Patrick Manson, James Watson, Robert A. Jamieson and C. A. Gordon, to provide health care for the CMCS employees and other foreign residents in the treaty ports. In 1870 Jamieson suggested to Robert Hart, Inspector General of the CMCS, to compile semi-annual medical reports for wider circulations of bio-data and ecological conditions in China. Such network of correspondence continued until 1910, the major outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria and North China. The network and communication of disease control had undergone structural transformation since then. This project would like to explore the theme of disease control networking and communication channels at the international and domestic levels, based on the medical reports and statistics returns of the CMCS and other missionary publications, and to uncover the social-economic and political underpinnings when the communication channels converging in episodes of epidemic outbreak.  

“Renaissance versus Revolution Across the Taiwan Straits: Nation-Building and Science/Technology in the 1960s-1970s.”

Third, the project is titled “Renaissance versus Revolution Across the Taiwan Straits: Nation-Building and Science/Technology in the 1960s-1970s.” From the early 20th century, most Chinese intellectuals, especially the May Fourth generation, believed that Chinese culture produced no indigenous science despite the scientific spirit noticeable in some areas of philosophy and scholarship. Not until the publication of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China from 1954, Chinese intellectuals were convinced of the soundness of such cultural heritage. In the 1960s, both the ROC and PRC governments proposed the Chinese translation of Needham’s work and published two separate versions of fan-ti-zi (traditional Chinese) and jian-ti-zi (simplified Chinese) in the course of political campaigns of Cultural Renaissance versus Cultural Revolution. The appropriation of Needham’s work by the two governments was regarded, in this paper, as a phenomenon of nation-building that created the identification of the citizen with the nation-state and intensified his participation, commitment and loyalty to it. Moreover, underneath such political upheavals, the development and implementation of science policies in general and nuclear technology in particular were competed by the governments across the Straits. Based on archival research, the paper explores science and technology during these eras as a site of nation-building and expressions of nationalism that very different views of the nation contested and negotiated with one another. Such rivaling undercurrents and competition in science and technology still continues into today’s relationships across the Straits and has been complicated by the US’s geopolitics. Some of its research outcome may be presented in the 2015 AAS in Taipei, if the panel I organized is accepted by the Selection Committee.