Moral Community of Weisheng: Contesting Hygiene in Republican China

Weisheng, literally "guarding life," serves as the Chinese translation for the English term "hygiene." Nevertheless, the respected author of a Chinese textbook on public health from 1934 stated in his preface: "Weisheng is about 'maintaining health' and not at all about 'guarding life.'" When read against the rise of weisheng in Ruth Rogaski's sense of "hygienic modernity" in China during the Republican period, this statement reveals a local and alternative conception of weisheng, linked more closely to traditional Chinese notions of "nurturing life" than to modern practices related to "germ warfare". Public health advocates, as well as many modern historians, saw little value in this popular discourse and mostly disregarded it. This paper takes this alternative discourse of weisheng seriously, tracing its emergence, articulating its specific features, and exploring its historical significance as an alternative to the notion of hygienic modernity. The central discovery of this article is that Chinese critiques of modern hygiene—personal hygiene, to be specific—did not focus on the actual techniques for preserving health but on their moral implications, i.e., their effects in the context of the dual construction of self-identity and moral community. Drawing on this discovery, this paper explains the curious reasons why political leaders of the Republican period devoted so much energy to the seemingly trivial practices of personal hygiene while leaving untouched the construction of a national system of public health. As the contestation over hygiene became closely connected with larger debates about individualism, nationalism, and modernity, critiques of, resistance to, and local visions of hygiene revealed the development of localized modernities in China, characterized by alternatives in hygiene, self-hood, bodily sensibility, and moral community.