Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

About the Author

Ruth Rogaski is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Sun the Perfected One’s Song of Guarding Life
Introduction

1. "Conquering the One Hundred Diseases":
Weisheng before the Twentieth Century
2. Health and Disease in Heaven’s Ford
3. Medical Encounters and Divergences
4. Translating Weisheng in Treaty-Port China
5. Transforming Eisei in Meiji Japan
6. Deficiency and Sovereignty:
Hygienic Modernity in the Occupation of Tianjin, 1900–1902
7. Seen and Unseen:
The Urban Landscape and Boundaries of Weisheng
8. Weisheng and the Desire for Modernity
9. Japanese Management of Germs in Tianjin
10. Germ Warfare and Patriotic Weisheng
Conclusion

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Rogaski has written a splendid book, multilayered, harmonious in its narrative voice, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, able to hold the attention of specialist and generalist alike. . . . In Rogaski’s hands ‘hygienic modernity’ turns out to be a brilliant thematic vehicle for talking about the transformation of a city in the twentieth century, able to link state projects, material culture, and everyday ways of living. Moreover, the clear prose and adroit examples make the book extremely readable, while the author’s sensitivity to alternative theoretical and interpretive possibilities sustains an intellectually complex framework.”
— Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

"By exploring both the transformations that took place in the understanding of weisheng [protecting life/vitality] and the changing nature of the lives of the people of Tianjin, Rogaski offers a nuanced picture of Chinese society during a century of tremendous upheaval. Hygienic Modernity is an important and fascinating book. It should be read by all scholars interested in the histories of modern China and Japan and by those investigating the development of public health in East Asia."
— Social History of Medicine

"Brilliantly conceived and superbly researched, this excellent study charts the transnational forces and circulating discourses on health that helped constitute a modern concept of hygiene in China. Over the course of the twentieth century the state, scientists, physicians, and the military all came to participate in the health management of aggregated populations, and eventually in the fitness of the race and nation. Insightfully placed within the context of a global modernity and the layered imperialisms of Japan and the "West," this is transnational history writing at its best. Indeed, it is one of the finest books we now have on modernity in East Asia."—Takashi Fujitani, University of California, San Diego, and author of Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War

"Rogaski examines health and disease in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin, from the years before it was opened as a treaty port to the early People's Republic. She shows how weisheng, or "hygienic modernity," was adopted by foreigners and local elites in the service of imperialism, national strength, and revolution. Hygienic Modernity breaks new intellectual ground in our understanding of imperialism, providing local texture and transnational reach. It is ingeniously researched and elegantly argued."—Gail Hershatter, author of Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Awards

John K. Fairbank 2005, American Historical Association
Joseph Levenson Book Prize - Post 1900 2006, Association for Asian Studies
Berkshire Conference First Book Prize 2005, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards