China in Global Health Histories: Vaccinating the Nation and the World
Public health in China became a global concern as a consequence of the outbreak and spread of COVID-19, yet Chinese physicians and administrators helped shape concepts and practices of ‘global health’ since before that term rose to prominence in the 1990s. This lecture examined the historical place of China in international health, focusing on mass vaccination programs. In the twentieth century, Chinese governments promoted large-scale immunization as a means of asserting competence and capacities in public health administration. During the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) promoted the control of infectious diseases, a success to which vaccination programs had contributed, alongside much more well-known barefoot doctors and rural medical programmes. This rural health care system became a model broadly championed in global health, yet it also helped lay the foundations for forms of bilateral medical diplomacy that remain relevant to contemporary vaccine distribution networks.
About the Historian
Mary Augusta Brazelton is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2019). She has published research on the history of medical education, tuberculosis control, penicillin production, and aviation infrastructures in twentieth-century China.
