Anyone who has some familiarity with the People's Republic of China today will be aware of the centrality of weisheng—hygiene—in the country's everyday life. After all, as recent studies from numerous disciplines and geographic subfields have shown, the emergence of hygiene as a way of life and a mode of governance is a defining feature of modern politics and social life. Ruth Rogaski provides us with a critical study of this process in China, particularly in Tianjin from the period when the city became a treaty port in the 1860s to the Korean War in the 1950s.
By taking on an issue that that was central simultaneously to modern Chinese history as well as to the larger global process, Rogaski immediately makes her project relevant on many fronts. This includes, but is not limited to, such issues as colonialism, transnational history, science studies, and governmentality. For her part, Rogaski emphasizes that she is drawing on insights from translation studies, urban history, as well as the history of medicine in order to illuminate the changing meanings of health and disease and their profound implications for Chinese society and politics.
However, Rogaski does not focus only on the moment of colonial encounter, which, intentionally or unintentionally, would often end up reinforcing the problematic divide between “traditional” and “modern.” Instead, she also demonstrates how weisheng—which literally means “guarding life”—involved an ensemble of evolving health and lifestyle practices prior to the arrival of European conceptions of health and medicine. Moreover, while weisheng as a set of ideas often invoked a greater cosmological outlook in earlier times, it was mostly a way of life and a matter of individual choices. Yet, by the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese medical and health practices increasingly appeared to be inadequate under the European colonial gaze. And it was during this time that the Japanese neologism eisei—itself signifying a set of health practices that were experiencing drastic transformation as a result of Meiji Japan's modernizing and colonial projects—found its way into China. Japan, however, was hardly the only force that shaped the emergence of modern hygienic practices in China. Tianjin, Rogaski argues, was a “hypercolony” (p. 11), occupied simultaneously by multiple colonial powers who tried to showcase their competing visions of hygienic modernity. By emphasizing the multiplicity of colonialism, Rogaski makes a persuasive case for the disunity of colonial powers and of science, avoiding the common problem of presenting “Western science” or “Western medicine” as a body of stable, homogenous, and uncontested knowledge.
Rogaski's suggestion of approaching treaty-port Tianjin as a hypercolony is also an important intervention in the recent debate about the relevancy of colonialism and semicolonialism as a category of historical analysis in Chinese studies. Briefly, some scholars argue that although China was never fully occupied by the colonial powers during the late Qing and Republican era, the imperatives of global capitalism and imperialism had essentially subjugated China to the same colonial violence and suppression. If differences existed between China and other formal colonies, it was only because colonialisms were always multifarious. Others, however, have resurrected the older concept of semicolonialism, arguing that because China was never fully occupied or colonized by the imperialist powers, its semicolonial past requires us to analyze the specificities of China's historical experience. While Rogaski is not unsympathetic to the notion of semicolonialism, she makes clear that one should also look at how and where the forces of colonialism actually affected China. In other words, just like colonialism, semicolonialism, too, was never monolithic. Furthermore, she characterizes Tianjin's semicoloniality as “hypercolonial” in the sense that it was not “half-full” (p. 12) in nature, as the idea of semicolonialism seems to imply. On the contrary, it was actually a case in which the city and its elite inhabitants seemed to wholeheartedly embrace the foreign-defined modernity. In this respect, Rogaski has enriched ongoing discussions on the nature of colonialism in Chinese studies, a topic that, it is hoped, will be followed up by other scholars.
Rogaski ends her book with two episodes of germ warfare. Whereas the management of germs was an integral part of Japanese colonial governance during the Asia-Pacific wars in the 1930s and 1940s, it quickly became a national project with renewed urgency in China under the Communist regime during the Korean War in the 1950s. During this time, the Chinese obsession with weisheng was articulated through the fear of foreign germs penetrating the Chinese social body. By ending the story with the way in which the wartime hygienic campaign became a technology of mass mobilization, Rogaski convincingly shows the extent to which weisheng had changed from a set of individual practices to a national project within just a century.
Rogaski has done a highly commendable job of examining the different aspects of hygienic discourses and practices under multiple coexisting as well as successive political regimes. But she is also aware of the fact that a top-down approach cannot tell the full story of the ascendancy of hygienic modernity. After all, the modern regime of power and knowledge targets both the collective social body as well as the individual. It is, of course, never easy to get at stories of how individuals experienced, internalized, and at times resisted ideas and policies that were being imposed on them. Nonetheless, Rogaski has tried her best to incorporate some stories from below in several of her chapters, making her narrative of this important moment in modern Chinese history more complete.
Combining meticulous empirical research and conceptual insights, Hygienic Modernity is a highly accomplished piece of scholarship. It points to the ways in which historians working on China might expand their conceptual parameters and make themselves available for productive dialogues with scholars working in other disciplines and subfields.
