Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China

Abstract

Ruth Rogaski, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. 415. £35.95 (hbk). ISBN 0–520–24001–4. Located just over 100 kilometers southeast of Beijing, the city of Tianjin is today one of China's busiest ports and one of its most modern cities. In this remarkable study, Ruth Rogaski examines the changing meanings of health over the period of roughly a century in what was one of China's largest treaty-ports. Utilizing a dazzling array of source materials, including materials from British and local Chinese archives, Rogaski explores the evolution in the meanings of weisheng through the lenses of the history of medicine, urban history, and translation studies. While some scholars have recently begun to use the term ‘semi-colonialism’ to describe China's position vis-à-vis the imperial Powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rogaski proposes another concept, ‘hypercolony’, derived in part from the language used by the famous Chinese revolutionary Sun Yatsen. She applies this to Tianjin's peculiar situation between 1860, when the port was opened at the end of the Second Opium War, and 1937 when the city was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. Tianjin did experience periods of violence and direct foreign control, particularly between 1900 and 1902 when the port was under foreign military rule in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, but Rogaski shows throughout her analysis the difficulty of finding a label to neatly characterize even this relatively short period in the history of any one place.

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