Xiaoping Fang, China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), pp. 312, $55.00, hardback, ISBN: 9780822946625).

Abstract

By braiding together multiple environmental and social factors – ranging from land and water transportation networks, festivities, seafood-eating habits, agricultural cycles, and intensified population gathering during ‘Shuangqiang, or the quick harvesting and planting of rice crops’(p. 3) – Fang presents an ecosystem that set the scene for Zhejiang’s cholera outbreak in July 1962. Cholera had a greater impact in rural areas owing to the poor water-management infrastructure there;women participated in agricultural production, making their infection rate equal to men’s;and the superior nutrition and limited contact with civilians on military bases explains the lower caseload among soldiers. [...]the book can also be read as an account of the resistance, confrontations, and negotiations that occurred between various strands of power in moving towards that style of governance, which was not without its blind spots: public health staff encountered difficulties and even violence when attempting to check inoculation certificates of officers in the People’s Liberation Army (Chapter 4);overseas Chinese were exempted from vaccination certificate checks because the PRC needed their remittances and skills (Chapter 4);and the Zhejiang government adapted its 1963 vaccination campaign to avoid peak farming season due to the passive participation of local cadres and farmworkers the previous year (Chapter 6).