Images of Chinese Medicine during the Cold War

Public health work occurs at multiple spatial, temporal and topical scales. In spatial terms public health moves from the microscopic scale wherein miniscule microbes serve as our adversaries, to the scale of the human body with health education targeting individual minds and bodies, to the communal scale of health regulations to reform habits among the social collective, to the national scale where regulatory and administrative bodies generate laws applicable to a specific nation-state, to the global scale where transnational monitoring programs address health crises that transcend national borders. Temporal scales range from centuries to seconds if we measure the time that passed between the first International Sanitary Conference in 1851 to the creation of the World Health Organization in 1948, the decades that pass between scientific discoveries and their public acceptance, the weeks it takes for a virus to mutate, or the seconds it takes for microbes to infect our bodies. Topically, public health encompasses discrete methods to combat specific diseases, as well as the holistic concept of “hygiene” that envelops under a single rubric everything from bathing and shaving to dietary practices and exercise regimens.

Since public health operates simultaneously on so many scales, this poster session challenges the isolationist model of Cold War-era health studies and demonstrates that experience in public health management gained in China during World War II served as a focal point for post-war international health work, in effect continuing the relationship among the Big Four Allies (the US, the UK, China and the Soviet Union) even as the Cold War sliced them apart as members of the First and Third Worlds. Methodologically, this poster juxtaposes imagery and discourses used to advertise Chinese public health within China against those addressed to international audiences in order to illustrate the interpolation of First and Third World audiences as distinct and different, even as they shared health practices and knowledge. 

Within China, early Communist-era public health posters employed Soviet-style socialist realism to communicate health information to a largely illiterate audience and affirm aesthetic as well as political similarity with the Soviet bloc. Without China, European audiences had exclusive access to over six hours of nearly uncut film footage that Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni shot in 1972 at the invitation of the Chinese government that subsequently banned the film. Cina, Chung Kuo introduced foreigners to Chinese medical practice, showing a smiling mother delivering a healthy child by Caesarean section with only acupuncture needles for anesthesia in a Beijing maternity clinic, and patients receiving care in a Nanjing health clinic. These scenes glorify Chinese medicine within an Orientalist discourse that renders China an exotic alternative to the viewers' putative normality. 

This poster session juxtaposes the internally circulated posters with clips from the Italian film to demonstrate the creation of opposing narratives about Chinese medicine during the Cold War. Accompanying text dismantles these discourses of difference with historical data that demonstrate ongoing collaboration in global public health in the same period.