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Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

 
Venue: 
Rooms 8 & 9, Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
Event date: 
Wednesday, 30 January, 2019 - 17:00 to 18:30

China Research Seminar Series talk given by Dr Mary Brazelton, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

This talk will survey immunology and mass vaccination programs in the People’s Republic of China, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party promoted vaccination as a means by which the central state asserted competence and capacities in public health administration. The success of these campaigns therefore helped bolster the legitimacy of the central government at a key moment in its consolidation of power. The PRC subsequently promoted the control of infectious diseases to which vaccination programs had contributed as a major administrative success alongside its much more well-known barefoot doctor and rural health care programmes. This rural health care system became a model broadly championed in communities of global health, but was also connected to regional and global Cold War politics.

Mary Brazelton is a lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China, will be published in October 2019 by Cornell University Press as a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.