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This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1961 the seventh global cholera pandemic, El Tor cholera, broke out in Indonesia. Between 1962 and 1964, El Tor infected the southeast coastal areas of China. This pandemic occurred at a time of significant reorganization for both the rural medical and health systems and the people's communes following the failures of the Great Leap Forward. This paper explores how local governments led rural medical practitioners, health care workers, and villagers to participate in the campaign against the spread of El Tor cholera despite the readjustment and retrenchment of the people's communes as social, administrative, and political units. I argue that, during this period of flux, the local government strengthened its control over rural medical practitioners by institutionalizing their daily work practices and reducing their freedom of movement, whilst simultaneously providing incentives for health care workers to join the vaccination campaign. The people's communes and the household-registration system after 1961 put further restrictions on population mobility. This cellularization of village society greatly facilitated the vaccination, quarantine, and epidemic-reporting processes, and contributed to the formation of an epidemic-prevention system and eventually a response scheme for managing public health emergencies in rural China. This process reflected the complexity of the mutual interactions between the political and medical systems under socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with the establishment of the Department of Public Health in 1912, the implementation of public health policies became an integral part of city management in Republican Guangzhou. Yet the cholera outbreak of 1932 fully exposed the weaknesses of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the city. Due to the Guangzhou government's inaction, the Fangbian Hospital, a local charitable hall founded in response to the bubonic plague of the 1890s, involuntarily took over the major responsibility for providing medical services for cholera patients in the early stage of the epidemic. Only after the death of hundreds of patients and Guangzhou being described as a ‘world of horror’ in the local press did the government-run hospital start to take a more active role. Epidemics have always served as catalysts for change in public health perceptions and practices. This paper attempts to explain how the cholera epidemic of 1932 changed the role of public health in the urban administration of the city. Emphasis is placed on analysing how the people of Guangzhou began to fight for a supply of clean drinking water once they came to realize the link between water and the spread of the fatal cholera epidemic in 1932. Clean water, which used to be seen as a commodity enjoyed by the privileged few, was now increasingly regarded as a citizen's right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at how globalization in the nineteenth century was inextricably entangled with localization in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau nexus on the southern fringe of China by tracing the growth of its unique medical culture. It explains the 'glocalizing' process by tracing the development of this medical culture, which consists of knowledge construction and institution building, in the context of highly volatile epidemiological conditions aggravated by increasingly heavy inter-regional trade and migration. It traces the dynamic circulation of people, materials, ideas, and practices in this southern edge of China, which was traditionally connected to southeast Asia and shared ecological backdrops that produced similar epidemiological experiences. The Canton nexus in the nineteenth century saw the growth of native medical knowledge that focused less on theoretical innovation than on the efficacy of therapeutic strategies. These ideas were likely to have been informed or reinforced by new anatomical knowledge disseminated by Western medical missionaries on the ground early in the century. The medical culture in the region was also marked by the formation of a series of local institutions that were fusions of Western-style hospitals and native merchant-run charity halls where diseases were studied and treated, and new public health management negotiated and implemented by experts from different traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]