Measuring Up: Anthropometrics and the Chinese Body in Republican Period China

summary:

This article is an exploration of the ways in which anthropometrics were incorporated into medical and public health practice in China during the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues that Chinese anthropometrics satisfied two contradictory imperatives. It reaffirmed racist articulations of difference that emphasized Chinese weakness and inadequacy. But it also nurtured a discourse for Chinese initiative and self-transformation. Because Chinese physicians and researchers believed that anthropometrics indexed social and environmental influence, they positioned Chinese involvement in anthropometrics as a technology for improvement. Chinese anthropometrics was a crucial site for constructing the Chinese nation as well as highlighting anxieties about the composition of such a nation.