Introduction to “Air-Water-Land-Human: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Health and Environment in East Asia”

Taken together, the contributions to this special issue clearly demonstrate how questions of health and environment open up interdisciplinary inquiry perhaps better than any other field in Asian studies. Within this expansive framework, one can simultaneously talk of the dao (道) and PCBs, lysogenic phage cycles and empire, or petrochemicals and ethnic identity. Through attention to global comparisons, these articles highlight areas where East Asian cases can make crucial contributions as specific as the historical epidemiology of a single disease or as sweeping as the theorizing of new forms of environmental activism

Air/"Qi" Connections and China's Smog Crisis: Notes from the History of Science

This article explores the relationship between qi and air in Chinese medical and scientific history in order to illuminate current approaches to air pollution and wumai (smog) in contemporary China. The modern concept of air is expressed in Chinese using terms related to the word qi. However, qi is a complex, multivalent term with a long history in Chinese cosmology and Chinese medicine and does not hold a clear one-to-one correspondence with air. Qi provided a resonating transcendent link between humans and their environment, yet pathogenic forms of qi arising from the environment could invade the body, causing illness and death. During the late nineteenth century, laboratory definitions of air as gas were introduced to China through the term qi, enabling some turn-of-the-century Chinese physicians such as Tang Zonghai to establish creative correspondences between air and qi that encompassed gas, vital energies, and even God. Such correspondences with their transcendent, potentially sacred valences appear to be unavailable today, even as contemporary Chinese embrace traditional medicines to ward off the effects of wumai. By probing the significant spaces between air and qi, this article suggests that the history of science in China has implications for how we might cope with and confront our current atmospheric crisis. Keywords: qi, air, translation, wumai, Tang Zonghai, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), PM 2.

Reconsidering the Barefoot Doctor Programme

This paper examines the widely acclaimed Barefoot Doctor campaign in China. The Barefoot Doctor Campaign has come to symbolize the success of Chinese health care to the extent that it has become a model for WHO public health strategy. Yet little has been done to understand how or whether it worked on the ground and what difficulties and contradictions emerged in its implementation. Using previously unexplored party archives as well as newly collected oral interviews, this paper moves away from a narrow focus on party politics and policy formulation by examining the reality of health care at the local level and the challenges faced by local authorities and individuals as the campaigns evolved

Knowing a Sentient Mountain: Space, science, and the sacred in ascents of Mount Paektu/Changbai

AbstractMount Paektu/Changbai is a massive stratovolcano situated on the current border between North Korea and China, in a region that has historically lain at the edges of competing Eurasian polities. Formed by a past of dramatic eruptions, Mount Paektu/Changbai has long been held as a powerful, sentient entity by those living near it, but the mountain's unique geographical features and distance from political centres rendered it extremely elusive as an object of elite empirical knowledge. This article examines narratives of multiple expeditions to Mount Paektu/Changbai from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in order to understand the role of space in the creation of knowledge about the mountain, and to probe how that knowledge intersected with political goals. Consideration of human experience of the mountain's topography and environment reveals a complex relationship between proximal and distal perceptions of nature. Even as they sought to create rational, ‘universal’ forms of knowledge about the mountain, Asian elites appropriated more localized belief in the mountain's powers, creating a hybrid knowledge that combined science and miracles. As the political context shifted in the late nineteenth century, the positioning of this hybrid knowledge shifted to become an indiginized basis for national resistance. This consideration of Mount Paektu/Changbai highlights the virtues of making space and environment central to the political and cultural history of northeast Asia.</jats:p