Visualising Lung Disease in Modern China: Body, Nation, and Environment from the Nanjing Decade to the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

Respiratory pathologies were major causes of death and disease in twentieth-century China. This thesis analyses lung disease in public health images from the advent of national public health services in the Republic of China in the 1920s, to the official recognition of the People’s Republic of China in intergovernmental health work in the 1970s. It argues that practices of visualising, displaying, and viewing lung diseases served to define these as medical conditions for urban publics, while simultaneously investing them with national significance. Through four case studies, it shows that over the course of the period studied, public health images of lung disease brought ever more citizens and audiences to engage with projects of national construction. In the process, such images contributed to new relationships between individual bodies, the environment, and Chinese nation-states. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the introduction of X-ray diagnosis in the 1930s produced visual categories for early- versus late-stage tuberculosis in educational images of the lung- diseased Chinese body as a symbol of national failure. Chapter 2 traces the orchestration and photojournalistic coverage of an annual summer camp for improving the respiratory health of children in the mid-1930s; it shows how visual constructions of children’s bodies as experimental subjects defined childhood as a site of medicalised resistance to imperialism. Chapter 3 details how programmes to control lung disease prioritised industrial workers and expanded in the early 1950s as public health images of lung disease enacted an entangled relationship between respiratory health and political consciousness. Chapter 4 illustrates how the People’s Republic sought transnational support and geopolitical legitimacy in part through portrayals of the control of occupational lung disease in foreign-facing propaganda magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. The thesis thus extends our understanding of public health and nationalism in modern China, and helps to historicise lung disease at the intersection of infectious, occupational, and environmental disease.