Ruth Rogaski

Triangulating her work between the disciplines of history of science, urban history, and translation studies, as well as the modernizing discourses of China, Japan, and various representative nations of "The West", Rogaski's book is a fascinating study of how weisheng developed in usage, focusing on the unique but illuminating circumstances of treaty-port Tianjin. The term 衛生 weisheng has been left untranslated throughout the majority of the book, allowing Rogaski to trace its genealogy from its "locus classicus" in the Daoist Zhuangzi, in which it means "guarding life" (22) through various means such as regulating diet and moderating emotions/sex/stimulation (the introductory poem is a good summary of its pre-modern meanings), to its more complicated modern manifestations, which resemble Foucault's concept of "biopower" (16, 300). Under the conditions of semicolonial Tianjin, Rogaski shows how local elites and Chinese citizens neither embraced "hygienic modernity" wholesale, nor were they constantly under the threat of colonial violence. Local complexities show how weisheng radically changed in the 20th century with the intrusion of foreign imperialism, and how it became an instrumental term describing certain functional relationships between state, society, and individuals.

The major turning point for the term weisheng occurred following the Boxer Uprising, when the presence of French, British, Japanese, and other imperial powers brought with them a medicalized, germ-based discourse on hygiene. Rogaski shows how even the West was in the process of defining and refining its medical discourse, so at the outset, Western definitions of hygiene and health were not so radically different from weisheng. Western translations such as those of John Fryer* and Japanese physician-bureaucrats such as Nagoya Sensai were key in changing values lade upon the term, eventually leading to a medical, corporeal discourse that rendered China as the weak, diseased, unhygienic nation opposite that of the modern, hygienic imperial nations. The Tianjin Provisional Government of 1900-1902 marked the beginning of more invasive policies that aimed to eliminate filth and germs by intervening in even the most basic aspects of people's lives. Weisheng, or lack thereof, was recast as the cause of China's deficiency, but in order to give hygienic modernity to the people, physical coercion was necessary. This involved measures such as quarantining and surveying citizens, changing their most intimate rituals such as the way they buried their dead, as well as altering urban structures by laying underground pipes, drainage ditches -- even tearing down Tianjin's city walls.

Central to Tianjin citizens' concerns was the importance of water, from periodic floods that created its nearby salt fields, to cholera epidemics caused by unsanitary water, to the livelihood of the city's more militant "Dark Drifters". This last category, the water and night-soil carriers, remained through the 1950s as one of the most visible symbols of how attempts to restructure the entire urban landscape in the name of modern hygiene remained incomplete under semicolonial rule. Though the British were able to get purified water in their settlement, others remained dependent upon the services of these Dark Drifters, partly because this was one of the few local guilds that mobilized to defend its labor territory (to link this with Hershatter's work on Tianjin laborers, Perry, and Strand).

The last section charts how the meaning of weisheng was irreversibly changed through the totalizing regimes of the Japanese and the Communists. Both concluding sections seem relatively scant in comparison to her discussion in the rest of her book, particularly that of Japanese Occupation-era Tianjin. Under the CCP, the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign mobilized citizens to participate in ridding the city of virulent pests, as well as drain cesspools, sweep streets, and so forth in acts of patriotic defense. By linking these communal activities, through metaphoric depictions of the "enemy" and calls to action, to the strength of the nation, the modern state reinforced the relationship between weisheng, modernity, and the health of the nation.… (meer)