Epidemic Performance: The Qing’s Manchurian Plague Policy, 1910-1911

Qiong Wu, Boston University

The Third Plague Pandemic was one of the deadliest global health crises in history. Manchuria was a major epicenter with nearly 60,000 deaths. Why did the Qing government who had a long tradition of utilizing Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in epidemic control, nevertheless adopt plague policy claimed as "Western measures" (xifa) and exclude TCM, despite recognizing strong local opposition and the government’s inability to implement such policy? Furthermore, why did Qing elites adopt xifa when Western medicine’s efficacy had not been established and was being challenged by indigenous medicine in the other parts of the world? Challenging the prevalent explanation that the Qing’s plague policy was coerced by the colonial powers, I argue that the Qing initiated and persisted on Western measures because Qing elites invested in the ideological superiority of Western medicine’s progressiveness (xianjin) and intended to utilize it as a medical agent to build a modern state image and legitimize their sovereignty facing threats from neighboring empires, suggesting the Qing’s internalized Orientalism. The Qing’s anti-plague effort was decoupled from epidemic control to geopolitical interests in the contested Manchurian borderland, as transnational measures (e.g., borderland traffic control and corpse management) were prioritized, while local measures (e.g., local quarantine and medical supplies) were poorly implemented. I argue that the Qing’s Manchurian plague policy stands as an instance of “epidemic performance”, which effectively won broad recognition from competing imperial powers, including Japan and Britain, as evidenced by the presence of officials from these empires at the International Plague Conference convened by the Qing in Mukden. Therefore, the Qing’s performance of Western measures was not incentivized by the material efficacy of Western medicine as World Society Theory would predict. Drawing from colonial critiques of Western medicine hegemony, Manchurian plague shows that the dominance of Western medicine was reproduced ideologically by Chinese elites.

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 Presented in Session 51. Disease Ecologies, Notions of Modernity, and Conceptions of Illness