L iping B u . Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865–2015

In recent years there has been increasing scholarly interest in tracing China’s medical and health history, in part to understand how China has got from collectivization to where it is today: a country with an unevenly marketized domestic health-care landscape and glaring disparities between urban and rural communities, rich and poor, and a state that is making biomedical and tech innovation a cornerstone of its self-image. Of course, many of these issues—the challenge of how to harness private incentive to the cause of public health, and the challenge of how to square costly investment in research and development with support for primary-care services to close the inequality gap—are being debated elsewhere. However, the speed and far-reaching nature of the changes in China, a country of 1.4 billion people, make health reform there a particular challenge. Liping Bu’s Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865–2015 contributes to the growing scholarship on China’s medical and health history. The book charts the development of public health in China from the late Qing period, through the Republican era, to the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the post-Maoist economic reforms instigated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and 1980s. It seeks to connect the evolution of health ideas, practices, and institutions to major political events. The aim is to read China’s health history as a reflection of those political changes, at the same time as suggesting that public health provided the preemptive ground for China’s wider modernization. As Bu asserts at the beginning of the book, “national health has been the image and the substance of the modern transformation of China” (4). Bu contends that the Chinese state, in its different ideological permutations, variously made use of public health as “a transformative force to change people’s attitude, values, and behavior” (12). Her emphasis, in other words, is on public health as a form of power politics—as she puts it explicitly, “a modern concept of national power” (25)—with health development conceived as an integral facet of China’s construction and reconstruction.

China · Economic growth · Economics · Health care · Health care reform · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Public health · Scholarship · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Health Policy