Will the Mosquito Retreat? Malaria and the Politics of Tropical Hygiene in Southern Yunnan

This paper examines the development of a modern regime of tropical hygiene in southern Yunnan from early years of socialist state-building in the 1950s to the period of market-oriented reforms in the 1980s. A Sino-Southeast Asian borderland, southern Yunnan largely remained outside the direct rule of political regimes based in China proper until the early 1950s. This was due, at least in part, to malaria-transmitting Anopheles mosquitoes, which presented insurmountable obstacles to state agents from more temperate regions. Yet, starting in the late 1950s, large waves of Han Chinese, mostly mobilized by the PRC state, began arriving in this tropical borderland to build rubber farms that contributed to the integration of southern Yunnan into China’s political-economic structure. Central to Chinese state-making in this borderland was the development of a new regime of knowledge and institutions for managing malaria, which never fully replaced indigenous ideas and practices. The state selectively adopted and promoted some indigenous ways of healing, often in combination with biomedicine, while trying to suppress others it viewed as superstitious or even subversive. The complex interactions between various humans (medical workers, state officials, local peoples, and migrant communities), nonhuman organisms (Anopheles mosquitoes, Plasmodium parasites, and quinine-containing cinchona plants), microclimatic changes, and ghosts and gods were spatially and temporally uneven. State-sponsored malaria control efforts based on ideas of hygiene and progress that were born in temperate regions often faltered in the dense networks of tropical socioecologies, which stretched across different ethnic communities and extended into neighboring Southeast Asian countries. After over two decades of ambitious campaigns to eradicate malaria in southern Yunnan, by the 1980s the Chinese state began to come to terms with the fact that the epidemic could not be tamed any time soon, even though the region’s ecology of malaria had been fundamentally transformed.