<i>Saving Lives in Wartime China: How Medical Reformers Built Modern Healthcare Systems amid War and Epidemics, 1928–1945</i>, by John R. Watt. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xxii+339 pp. €135.00/US$175.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article FreeReviewsSaving Lives in Wartime China: How Medical Reformers Built Modern Healthcare Systems amid War and Epidemics, 1928–1945, by John R. Watt. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xxii+339 pp. €135.00/US$175.00 (cloth).Marta E. HansonMarta E. HansonJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAlthough several fine histories of modern East Asia recently have been written, none of them integrated public health as a narrative thread, much less a central theme. Reading John Watt's Saving Lives in Wartime China reaffirms to me that public health is one of the central themes of twentieth-century East Asia. This neglect of public health and medical transformations in survey narratives of the period is arguably more because of their authors' professional training in other dimensions of history than the actual significance of such transformations in modern East Asian history. This absence is gradually being remedied with the new scholarship of the past decade that integrates public health and medical reforms into twentieth-century Chinese and East Asian history.1Related to the political and military history of the first half of twentieth-century China, in this new book Watt argues that the Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) took radically different approaches to saving the lives of their soldiers and the peasants that had dramatically different consequences. Whereas the KMT did not provide adequately either for the nutrition or the health care of its conscript armies nor did it hold back from short-term military decisions that resulted in killing millions of Chinese civilians, the CCP's policy to protect the lives of its soldiers as well as peasants who joined them proved decisive in the eventual Communist victory and establishment of the PRC. Watt aims "to pull healthcare, death and lifesaving into mainstream analysis of 1) bitter conflicts characterizing the history of Nationalist China, 2) the will to promote better care of vulnerable people despite the forces resisting this goal" (14). He places the work of specific medical reformers at the center of Republican Chinese history and connects the enormous loss of life in 1930s and 1940s China from war, famine, disease, and malnutrition to the comparable loss of life in the huge conscript armies of World War I. He thus brings the Chinese causalities of the period into a comparison with those in Europe during the world wars.Before Saving Lives, John Watt wrote a book about the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China's first half-century of medical philanthropy in Taiwan: Friend in Deed: ABMAC and the Republic of China, 1937–87. Both that book and Saving Lives in Wartime China examine medical reformers and their role in developing modern health-care systems in Chinese-speaking regions, but the new book addresses their failures as well as successes within extremely constraining circumstances and deeply problematic institutions. The book's seven core chapters are preceded by an introduction that weaves disease, poverty, and war around the book's central theme on saving lives. The book's conclusion discusses why saving lives mattered not just epidemiologically and demographically but also politically and historically.Each chapter examines this theme during a specific period, with different actors, public health policies and institutions, and therefore differing consequences. Chapter 1 elaborates on epidemics, wars, and public health-care advocacy in China during 1911–28, setting a foundation for two chapters about the following decade: chapter 2 on the advances and setbacks in the KMT government's public health management during 1928–37 and chapter 3 on the Red Army's health services in Jiangxi and on the Long March during 1927–36. The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 is the broad historical context for the remaining four chapters. Chapter 4 addresses the Japanese invasion, army medicine, and the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps during 1937–42, and chapter 5 considers "how rigidity, disease, and hunger undermined Nationalist China's military medical reformers" (159). Chapter 6 examines public health amid the turmoil of war during 1938–49, and chapter 7 turns to Yan'an's health services under the Communist Party in 1937–45.Watt did not integrate into his arguments several important related works that demonstrate public health history's centrality to modern Chinese history, including books by Carol Benedict and Furth and Leung (editors), or that established hygienic modernity as a key analytical concept for the period (Rogaski)—although he cites Rogaski, he does not engage with her concept—or the earlier articles by historians of Chinese medicine in Republican China who clarified the multiple roles of Chinese medical practitioners in the making of modern China. But these are minor shortcomings in a book that provides by far the richest empirical evidence on "saving lives in wartime China" and the most persuasive arguments to date about why this mattered not just epidemiologically and demographically but also ethically. Historians of public health in East Asia, global public health, and public health policy as well as researchers and teachers of twentieth-century Chinese history will appreciate both the forceful arguments and the historical specifics synthesized in Watt's magnum opus. Notes 1. For example, books by Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Ka-che Yip, Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Michael Shiyung Liu, Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-Ruled Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: AAS, 2009); Charlotte Furth and Angela Ki Che Leung, eds., Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Public in the Long Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Tina Phillips Johnson, Childbirth in Republican China: Delivering Modernity (1911–1949) (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011); Alexander Bay, Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012); Liping Bu, Darwin Stapleton, and Ka-che Yip, eds., Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia (London: Routledge, 2012); John DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health and Nation-Building in South Korea since 1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Bridie Andrews, Making Modern Medicine in China, 1860–1960 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014); Bridie Andrews and Mary Brown Bullock, eds., Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: When Chinese Medicine Encountered the State, 1910–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Liping Bu and Ka-che Yip, eds., Public Health and National Reconstruction in Post-war Asia: International Influences, Local Transformations (London: Routledge, 2012); Ka-che Yip and Yuen Sang Leung, eds., Health Policy and Disease in Colonial and Post-colonial Hong Kong, 1841–2003, Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia (London: Routledge, 2016); Robert Peckham, Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Miriam Gross, Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao's Campaign to Deworm China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Liping Bu, Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2011); Brett Walker, The Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 77January 2017 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689234 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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