Moralized Hygiene and Nationalized Body: Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in China on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution

Abstract

Western knowledge about the injurious effects of cigarette smoking on smokers’ health appeared in the late nineteenth century and was shaped by both the Christian temperance movement and scientific developments in chemistry and physiology. Along with the increasing import of cigarettes into China, this new knowledge entered China through translations published at the turn of the twentieth century. It was reinterpreted and modified to dissuade the Chinese people from smoking cigarettes in two anti-cigarette campaigns: one launched by a former American missionary, Edward Thwing, in Tianjin, and a second by progressive social elites in Shanghai on the eve of the 1911 Revolution. By examining the rhetoric and practice of the campaigns, the author argues that the discourse of hygiene they deployed moralized the individual habit of cigarette smoking as undermining national strength and endangering the future of the Chinese nation, thus helping to construct the idea of a nationalized body at this highly politically charged moment.

Along with today’s increasing concern about the harmfulness of cigarette smoking to public health, the history of tobacco has received increasing attention in recent years (Goodman 1993; Hilton 2000; Gilman and Zhou 2004). Although most of the scholarship on the contemporary history of tobacco control focuses on the period after medical research indisputably proved that cigarette smoking poses health hazards (Brandt 2007; Proctor 2012), the history of earlier anti-smoking campaigns, from the period when scientific evidence alone could not fully support the agenda of tobacco control, still intrigues scholars. These campaigns were closely related to broader social trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Christian temperance movement in Britain and the United States and the global concern for the strength of nations in a world of struggle and competition informed by social Darwinism (Tate 1999; Hilton 2000).

Anti-cigarette campaigns were established in China soon after the introduction of machine-made cigarettes. A former American missionary, Edward Thwing, launched the first campaign in Tianjin in 1910, and local elites initiated a similar one in Shanghai in 1911. Carol Benedict briefly discusses the latter campaign in her book on Chinese smoking culture, Golden-Silk Smoke. She analyzes the rhetoric that discouraged women from smoking cigarettes in this and later anti-cigarette campaigns to explain the disproportionally low rate of female smokers in modern China (Benedict 2011, 210–217). This paper focuses on the first two campaigns to demonstrate how the moralized discourse of hygiene was deployed to help construct the idea of a nationalized body among the Chinese people. Like anti-smoking campaigns in the West, these campaigns were considerably influenced by the Christian temperance movement. However, the Chinese campaigns were also deeply embedded in their own unique circumstances—specifically the highly politically charged atmosphere on the eve of the 1911 Revolution—and demonstrated social and political dynamics quite different from their Western counterparts.

Moreover, the Chinese anti-cigarette campaigns embodied an important phase in the transformation of the concept of weisheng—which means, essentially, “hygiene”—in modern China.¹ In Hygienic Modernity, Ruth Rogaski teases out the process by which the meaning and practice of weisheng shifted away from a notion of “guarding life,” namely seeking individual longevity according to pre-twentieth-century Chinese correlative cosmology, to one of “hygienic modernity,” which she describes as “a powerful ideology linking the government, the police, the laboratory, and the people in one encompassing project of national health” (Rogaski 2004, 135). Rogaski argues that John Fryer’s use of the word weisheng in his translations of Western treatises on personal hygiene in the 1880s played a transitional role in this semantic shift, because he mixed laboratory science with Christian temperance to guide the Chinese practice of “guarding life.” However, he failed to deliver the idea of public health. It was the Japanese physician Nagayo Sensai, together with other Meiji elites, who translated the Western concept of public health as sensai (the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term weisheng), which was then translated into Chinese as weisheng at the turn of the twentieth century (Rogaski 2004).

My research suggests that John Fryer’s translation of moralized hygiene, which combined Western knowledge with the Chinese practice of “guarding life,” represented an indispensable step toward a modern understanding of weisheng as public health. The Chinese anti-cigarette campaigners in the early twentieth century borrowed their rhetoric from quasi-scientific Western literature on the harm of cigarette smoking and constructed their rhetoric based on the moralized discourse of hygiene, similar to John Fryer’s translation of weisheng. These campaigns redefined the personal habit of cigarette smoking as conduct that damaged the national body and undermined national well-being. The medico-moral discourse of personal hygiene utilized in these campaigns, together with other nationalist rhetoric, thus constructed the reform of individual bodies as an essential way to save the Chinese nation, the same purpose of “hygienic modernity” as illustrated by Rogaski.

Understanding the Medical Effects of Tobacco

In indigenous societies in the New World, tobacco was originally used both as an herbal remedy and as a divine substance in shamanistic practices due to its hallucinatory effects. After Columbus brought tobacco back to Europe in the late fifteenth century, European physicians tried to evaluate its medicinal properties through the Galenic, or humoral, system, the dominant medical theory in Europe then, in order to integrate it into European medicine. In 1571, Nicolas Monardes, the leading physician of Seville, authoritatively established the humoral essence of tobacco as “hot and dry” and listed more than twenty diseases tobacco could cure in his famous history of medicinal plants of the New World. The nicotine therapy that Monardes advocated continued until the nineteenth century in official medical practices and persisted even longer in fringe medicine (Goodman 1993, 38–46).

When tobacco was introduced into China in the late sixteenth century, Chinese physicians understood it in the medical framework based on yin-yang cosmology. Physicians regarded tobacco as containing “warm” yang energy, which echoed the European understanding of tobacco’s essence as “hot and dry.” Due to this medical evaluation, tobacco became popular first in northeastern China (Manchuria) and humid mountainous areas in the south, where people smoked it to expel colds and prevent diseases such as cholera and malaria (Laufer 1924, 3). Tobacco soon prevailed in China as a new cash crop. People consumed it more as an everyday recreational substance for its psychoactive effect than as an herb to prevent and cure diseases.² By the eighteenth century, tobacco use in its three major forms—dry pipe, water pipe, and snuff—had become an integral part of people’s daily life (Brook 2004; Benedict 2011).

Traditional Chinese medical culture supported moderate daily use of tobacco. Chinese physicians generally agreed that tobacco could provide yang vitality to its users. Since the correlative cosmology of Chinese medicine emphasized the balance of vitalities inside one’s body as the fundamental requirement for health, as Carol Benedict explains, whether tobacco use benefited or undermined smokers’ health would depend “on the predispositions of the user and the particular conditions under which it was inhaled” (Benedict 2011, 79). Based on this medical understanding, proper use of tobacco according to one’s particular physical condition might serve as “the use of foods and drugs to correct imbalance and bolster the vitalities,” the foremost technique of guarding life in late imperial China (Rogaski 2004, 45).

Both Western and Chinese physicians supported moderate tobacco use and even used it as a remedy for various ailments before laboratory science in the West fundamentally changed the medical profession in the nineteenth century. After nicotine had been isolated from tobacco and was proven to be poisonous in 1828, tobacco was used much less in professional medicine in the West (Walker 1980, 391). In 1857, a series of debates over the harms of tobacco use took place in the Lancet and other medical journals in Britain. In this controversy, twenty-three of the total forty-four letters from medical practitioners condemned tobacco use as harmful to one’s health, while the others supported moderate use (Walker 1980, 393). The evidence against tobacco use came mainly from these doctors’ clinical experiences and can hardly be viewed as valid statistical data according to current criteria. The anti-tobacco doctors claimed that smoking could cause all kinds of damage, some of which—such as poisoning, nausea, and dyspepsia—were subsequently verified, but some of which—such as paralysis, insanity, idleness, hysteria, blindness, deafness, impotence, and loss of memory—were based on contentious evidence or simply moral judgment reflecting the general atmosphere of temperance in Victorian Britain (Hilton 2000, 68). The “Great Tobacco Controversy” accumulated a body of knowledge that interwove laboratory science with moral-religious judgment. This quasi-scientific knowledge about the harms of tobacco was deployed to support anti-tobacco campaigns, which accompanied other temperance campaigns in their fights against the perceived vices of drinking, opium taking, and gambling in late nineteenth-century Britain (Hilton 2000, 71–76).³

This reservoir of knowledge served a similar campaign in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Inspired by the revival of evangelism, the growing American middle class in the Progressive Era developed an enhanced awareness of social reform and a renewed interest in temperance. In particular, after the invention of cigarette-making machines revolutionized the tobacco industry by significantly increasing the production of cigarettes in the 1880s, the mass production of cigarettes led to a large increase in the number of cigarette smokers among the working class and the urban poor, groups whom the middle class regarded as the objects of its social reform. Under these circumstances, cigarette smoking was identified as disgraceful, immoral, and unhealthy behavior, just like drinking.⁴ Christian temperance organizations played an essential role in creating this new perception. At the core of the campaign, Lucy Page Gaston, a devoted alumna of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded the Anti-Cigarette League of America in 1899. Protestant groups such as the WCTU and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), industrial entrepreneurs looking for qualified workers, and reformists concerned about the fitness of soldiers also participated in the campaign. In their anti-cigarette rhetoric, quasi-scientific medical knowledge about tobacco was further moralized in religious and reformist contexts (Tate 1999, 39–49, 54–55).

Anti-tobacco campaigns and controversies about the harms of tobacco use appeared not only in Britain and the United States but also in France, Canada, Japan, and to a lesser degree, in some other European countries at the turn of the century (Goodman 1993, 116–121; Alston, Dupré, and Nonnenmacher 2002; Ogawa 2004, 94). The anti-tobacco rhetoric in these campaigns was quite similar: smoking would cause all kinds of health problems, induce alcohol and drug abuse, and waste money; it would also ruin a smoker’s character, weaken his mind, and corrupt his morality, ultimately disqualifying him as a pious Christian, loyal citizen, efficient laborer, and brave soldier. The harms of cigarette smoking to juveniles were highlighted in particular for their vicious impact on future generations against the backdrop of transnational anxiety about the physical and mental condition of a nation, anxiety informed by social Darwinism, which was an intellectual trend popular all over the world at the turn of the twentieth century. According to social Darwinism, nations followed the same principles of nature—that is, struggle for existence and survival of the fittest—so a nation must cultivate capable members to compete for superiority in the world and avoid the fate of extinction. Thus, in the Western anti-cigarette rhetoric at the turn of the twentieth century, the harm of cigarette smoking was articulated not only based on the medical concern about smokers’ individual health but also in reference to socio-political concerns about national well-being.

Translating Quasi-Scientific Knowledge About Tobacco Use into Chinese

Machine-made cigarettes revolutionized not only the tobacco industry, but also smoking culture all over the world. After American companies introduced cigarettes to China in the 1880s, the sales of cigarettes there increased from 9.1 million per year in 1890 to 357.9 million in 1900. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the annual consumption of cigarettes in China continued to rise dramatically to 7.5 billion in 1910 (Cochran 1980, 234). There are several reasons for the popularization of cigarettes in China. Machine-made cigarettes are portable and easily lit with matches and thus more suitable to modern urban life than other forms of tobacco use. The aggressive and effective marketing campaigns of foreign tobacco companies in China were the major force pushing the switch from pipes to cigarettes among Chinese (Cochran 1980, 17–40). A general spirit of modernization and westernization at that time also encouraged Chinese to adopt this new form of tobacco use from the West. A contemporary critic commented sarcastically: “Among all the reforms, adopting cigarette smoking was the fastest and the most widely spread” (Anjian zhaizhu, 1907). Young school students in Western-style schools were particularly ready to accept a Western lifestyle, so they were often the first to start smoking cigarettes (Ding Fubao 1911a). Moreover, some Chinese smokers regarded cigarettes as a less deleterious and addictive alternative to opium when the government started to prohibit opium in 1905 (Anonymous 1910b). Cigarette companies also used the ban on opium to promote cigarette smoking, as in an advertisement that read: “Cigarette smoking can relieve the dizziness felt after drinking and can eliminate all kinds of anxiety. Its taste is a hundred times better than opium, while you don’t need to worry about becoming addicted” (Zhongwai Ribao 1899). By the first decade of the twentieth century, when almost all cigarettes in China were imported, cigarette smoking there had established its social image as a modern, fashionable, entertaining, and convenient way to use tobacco, especially among those who had more contact with the West.

Western knowledge about tobacco based on both laboratory science and moral judgment also came into China through translations published in modern-style newspapers. As shown in the Great Tobacco Controversy in Britain in 1857, this quasi-scientific knowledge could lead to two different attitudes: on one hand, that tobacco use is absolutely harmful, and on the other hand, that it is not harmful when used moderately. The first Chinese translators of Western knowledge chose the latter standpoint, which was not so different from the traditional Chinese perception of tobacco use. A January 1899 article in Shen Bao, the major newspaper in Shanghai, was the first to quote “Western scientists” (taixi gewujia) to assert that tobacco would stimulate smokers’ minds and their secretion of saliva, having positive effects if used moderately, but that it would harm smokers’ health if used excessively (Anonymous 1899). In December 1908, an article in Dagong Bao, then the largest newspaper in north China, explained the chemical ingredients of tobacco and identified nicotine in tobacco as a toxin for the first time. This anonymous article also supported moderate use of tobacco, saying that “if one inhaled a very tiny, innocuous amount of nicotine through smoking, one’s spirit and energy would both be enhanced and one’s reaction would be alerted” (Anonymous 1908).

The new knowledge of tobacco use, and cigarette smoking in particular, was soon integrated into the traditional Chinese practice of hygiene as “guarding life.” A cigarette advertisement in Dagong Bao on June 27, 1905, claimed,

It is made from materials completely harmless to one’s life. Its nature is warm and moisturizing. Its taste is pure and fine. Its pleasant fragrance can stimulate your stomach and refresh your mind. Please smoke it without concern about harm to your body. It is indeed an excellent thing for hygiene [shi weisheng zhi jiapin ye].

In the meantime, the perception that cigarette smoking was harmful was also circulating. A news report on June 27, 1905, in Dagong Bao disclosed that Empress Dowager Cixi quit cigarette smoking because “she studied the essential knowledge about hygiene [weisheng yaozhi] and knew that cigarette smoking hurt the brain’s ability to think.”⁵ Irrespective of whether cigarette smoking was regarded as benefiting or undermining smokers’ health, in this report the issue of weisheng was discussed in the context of personal health as “guarding life,” instead of as “hygienic modernity” related to national salvation.

In contrast, American missionaries in China and Chinese Christian organizations deployed Western knowledge to condemn cigarette smoking unequivocally. As a part of their social gospel of reforming the Chinese people, especially the younger generation, they regarded cigarette smoking as an emerging evil and translated Western anti-cigarette rhetoric to support their agenda soon after cigarettes were first imported into China.⁶ They targeted youth as their main audience, using Qingnian magazine (China’s Young Men, as its English version was titled), the official periodical of the Chinese YMCA, to publicize the harm of cigarettes. As the first and most popular magazine aimed specifically at educated youth, Qingnian had a broad readership among students in modern schools and young businessmen in cities.⁷

Through the Chinese translation of The Cigarette and Youth, published in Qingnian in June and September 1909 as “Zhiyan yu qingnian,” American anti-cigarette rhetoric was introduced to Chinese readers comprehensively for the first time. Written by E. A. King, the president of the Central Anti-Cigarette League in Kentucky, and originally published in the United States in the 1890s, The Cigarette and Youth was a typical anti-cigarette pamphlet that combined science with moral indoctrination. King quoted medical knowledge and laboratory science to prove the harms of cigarette smoking, but he emphasized its harms to youngsters’ morality and intelligence as much as to their physical fitness. Moreover, like other contemporary anti-cigarette advocates, he added dubious evidence to condemn cigarettes. For example, he claimed that cigarette manufacturers added opium to cigarettes, that handmade cigarettes were made in filthy conditions by contaminated lower-class laborers, and that the smoke of cigarettes would make people feel thirsty and thus lead to the habit of drinking (King 1897, 3–7; Lübing 1909, 148–150). King claimed that his focus on young people was “for the moral, physical and legal protection of the rising generation” (King 1897, 12). The Chinese version of the pamphlet made the objective even clearer by saying that the anti-cigarette efforts were “for the sake of the nation and the race [wei guojia zhongzu ji]” (Lübing 1909, 174).⁸ The personal habit of cigarette smoking was thus related to the future of the nation.

Soon after the Chinese translation of The Cigarette and Youth was published in Qingnian, Dr. M. J. Exner, the director of physical education at the Chinese YMCA, wrote a treatise titled “China and the Cigarette” based on anti-cigarette writings in the United States in order to elaborate on the damage caused by cigarette smoking to young people’s growing bodies: cigarette smoking would weaken the heart, contaminate the lungs, overstimulate the stomach, burden the kidneys, poison the optic nerves, and slow the brain (Exner 1910a, 17–27). The treatise was abridged and published in China’s Young Men in February 1910; its Chinese translation followed in Qingnian in May 1910. The Chinese YMCA also published a Chinese translation of the unabridged version of “China and the Cigarette” in pamphlet form to make it accessible to a readership broader than subscribers of Qingnian (Exner 1910b).

Intriguingly, the pamphlet was included among the Chinese YMCA’s “Essential books on hygiene that everybody should read” (weisheng yaoshu renren yidu), along with other titles on personal hygiene, such as New Knowledge of Hygiene (Weisheng xinyi), On Students’ Hygiene (Xuesheng weisheng tan), and Illustrations of Gymnastics (Ticao tushuo).⁹ The anti-cigarette rhetoric in “China and the Cigarette” used both Western medical knowledge and moral indoctrination, so it shared the same source of knowledge as what John Fryer translated under the rubric weisheng to construct the new idea and practice of personal hygiene in the 1880s (Rogaski 2004, 108–123). However, what makes Exner’s pamphlet different from Fryer’s translation of Western personal hygiene was that Exner highlighted the connection between personal hygiene and the well-being of the nation, as the title of his pamphlet, “China and the Cigarette,” implied. He condemned tobacco use, and cigarette smoking in particular, as a habit “especially destructive to the higher qualities of manhood: courage, initiative, will, self-control and moral sense” in the conclusion of the English version (Exner 1910a, 27). In the last section of the Chinese version, titled “The relationship between cigarettes and today’s China,” Exner reiterated explicitly that because children and adolescents were “the essence of the wealth and power of a nation” (guojia fuli zhi jinghua), cigarette smoking was closely related to national well-being due to its poisonous effects on youth (Exner 1910b, 25).¹⁰ Thus, Exner not only introduced the globally circulating anti-cigarette rhetoric into China, but also brought the implicit assumption of this rhetoric with it—namely that personal hygiene should be moralized to cultivate the qualities valued by the nation in its workforce, citizens, and soldiers.

In short, Western quasi-scientific knowledge about tobacco use, and cigarette smoking in particular, was translated into Chinese through two channels. Some Chinese writers introduced the new knowledge to enrich the traditional knowledge and practice of guarding life. They used foreign knowledge to support the moderate use of tobacco without challenging Chinese smoking culture. In contrast, Christian translators deployed the new knowledge to oppose tobacco use unequivocally. They translated Western anti-cigarette rhetoric verbatim and systematically to serve their social gospel agenda in China. In their translations, they emphasized the harm of juvenile smoking to the nation, as transnational anti-cigarette movements often did, so as to reinforce the significance of young bodies for the future of a nation, and they moralized the practice of personal hygiene. It was this second kind of translation that Chinese anti-cigarette campaigns turned to for supporting evidence. In these campaigns, as I will show in the next sections, the moral meanings attached to the new knowledge would be articulated more comprehensively; imported anti-cigarette rhetoric would also be modified and reinterpreted to fit Chinese contexts.

Protecting Citizens’ Bodies: Edward Thwing’s Campaign Against Cigarettes

Edward Waite Thwing, a former American missionary who had spent more than a decade in Canton in the late nineteenth century, returned to China in 1909. He returned as the representative of the International Reform Bureau (Wanguo Gailiang Hui), a small organization established by Wilbur Crafts, who intended to promote evangelical morality and temperance in the United States and who also pursued an anti-opium agenda in China (Foster 2002). Soon after Thwing arrived in Tianjin, he recognized cigarette smoking as an emerging threat perhaps even more severe than opium. As early as late 1909, Thwing tried to persuade the Zhili provincial governor, Yang Shixiang, to levy a special tax on cigarettes, so that the higher price of cigarettes would discourage people from smoking and the government could increase its revenue (Ding Yihua 1910c). From January to October 1910, Thwing devoted himself fully to the anti-cigarette campaign in Tianjin: he published articles under his Chinese name, Ding Yihua, in Dagong Bao, gave speeches at schools, disseminated flyers in public spaces like railway stations, and mobilized Chinese elites to promote the anti-cigarette agenda.

Thwing was not the only one promoting the anti-cigarette agenda in China at the time. The Chinese YMCA in Shanghai showed similar concern about the increasing consumption of cigarettes. Lübing’s translation of King’s The Cigarette and Youth was published in late 1909 and Exner’s “China and the Cigarette” was published in early 1910. In the editorial published in China’s Young Men in May 1910, the editor claimed that the “calamity of tobacco” would come to take the place of opium, while the opium calamity was “almost at an end” (Anonymous 1910a). However, there is no evidence to indicate that Thwing’s choice to oppose cigarette smoking had a direct relationship with the anti-cigarette rhetoric published by the Chinese YMCA in Shanghai. The YMCA’s commitments to the anti-cigarette agenda might have originated from a global trend, especially the anti-cigarette campaigns in the United States. Despite the similarity, Thwing’s anti-cigarette rhetoric was still quite different from the verbatim translations of foreign rhetoric published in Qingnian and China’s Young Men. Thwing deliberately adapted his anti-cigarette rhetoric to the contemporary social mindset in China and imbued the individual habit of cigarette smoking with a significant social meaning beyond personal hygiene.

From January to October 1910, Thwing published twenty articles (some serialized) regarding social reform in China in the vernacular column of Dagong Bao. The topics of these articles ranged from quitting the use of cigarettes, opium, and alcohol to mandating education and building public parks. Ten of these articles were devoted exclusively to the anti-cigarette agenda, and six articles advocated reform of social evils in China, including cigarette smoking. This cluster of Thwing’s writings indicated that he launched his anti-cigarette campaign not to teach the Chinese about the new knowledge of personal hygiene and not simply to copy the Western temperance movement. Instead, following the strategy of social evangelism, he aimed to reform China through correcting the undesirable practices of the Chinese people, a goal widely shared by many enlightened Chinese social elites at that time.¹¹

Despite Thwing’s overall concern with social reform, health was still a major component of his anti-cigarette writings. He relied on the quasi-scientific Western knowledge to support his argument that cigarette smoking was poisonous and extremely harmful to human bodies, especially young growing bodies. For example, in the article “Physicians’ Opinions on Cigarette Toxins” (Yixuejia zhi yandu lun), published in Dagong Bao, Thwing said that someone might think he was fabricating the harm of cigarette smoking to scare people, so he cited “several famous doctors” to prove it. Among the eleven quotations in this article, Thwing mentioned only one specific name. All the quotations are vague in content, but strong in tone, like this one: “A doctor in New York City said, ‘smokers’ mental and physical powers are weaker than nonsmokers’” (Ding Yihua 1910f). It seemed that Thwing used the quotation only for rhetorical purposes, rather than to provide accurate evidence. He might even have deliberately chosen not to address the problem with too many technical details, because his target audience consisted of school students and the common Chinese people who read the vernacular columns of Dagong Bao.

Thwing made efforts to explain why Chinese people should value their health more than their pleasure, instead of treating this as an unquestionable premise. To appeal to his Chinese audience, Thwing resorted to Confucianism. In an article, he quoted the words of Confucius’s famous disciple, Zeng Can: “My whole body, including my hair and skin, is given by my parents. I dare not harm it” (shen ti fa fu, shou zhi fu mu, bu gan hui shang). In other words, keeping oneself healthy is an essential part of filial piety (xiao), a highly valued virtue in Confucianism (Ding Yihua 1910a). Thus, Thwing endowed Western medical evidence with a traditional Chinese moral core in order to encourage his Chinese audience to quit smoking.

Moreover, Thwing also resorted to the constitutionalist discourse prevalent in the last decade of the Qing dynasty, when progressive social elites pushed the government to adopt a constitutional monarchy. The concept of “constitutional citizens” was pivotal to strengthening Thwing’s anti-cigarette agenda. In his article “Self-Cultivation” (Xiushen), Thwing first repeated a commonly known Confucian tenet: “Every family and every country is composed of individuals, so if each individual is pursuing self-cultivation, then every family will be in harmony, every country will be in good order, and the whole world will be in peace” (Ding Yihua 1910d). Then he reinterpreted this tenet according to the constitutionalist discourse present at the time:

Individual rights, namely civil rights [minquan], compose the foundation of constitutionalism. All the citizens in a constitutional state have inviolable individual rights. If an individual does not cultivate himself, how can he shoulder his civil rights? Moreover, citizens in a constitutional state must have the qualifications of constitutional citizens. If one does not cultivate oneself, how can he qualify as a constitutional citizen? Therefore, in this era of constitutionalism, we have to cultivate ourselves first, in order to shoulder the responsibilities of constitutional citizens.

(Ding Yihua 1910d)

Thwing understood the foundation of a constitutional state as the close bond between individual citizens and the nation, so he regarded the maintenance of individual bodies as the responsibility of constitutional citizens. Based on this assumption, he condemned cigarette smoking. He said that in order to protect one’s body, intelligence, and spirit for the nation, one should avoid harmful things, especially cigarettes. In his conclusion, Thwing encouraged people to quit cigarette smoking immediately as the first step toward becoming qualified constitutional citizens (Ding Yihua 1910d).

Thwing provided cigarette smokers an additional identity of “constitutional citizens” to give their personal conduct an extra layer of social meaning—cigarette smoking was thus construed as an action that hurt the national body. In “Sincere Words to Earnest Compatriots” (Jing gao rexin tongbao), Thwing listed four effects of cigarette smoking: destroying the nation, ruining the family, hurting the body, and undermining morality. He said, “The rise and fall of a nation normally depends on the talent of its people. Now China is preparing for constitutionalism and is in urgent need of talented people. Given that cigarettes damage smokers’ talent, won’t cigarette smoking lead to the destruction of the nation?” Then Thwing used the example of British and American armies forbidding soldiers to smoke cigarettes to show that the potential of cigarette smoking to destroy a nation was treated seriously by these Great Powers, and he urged China to model itself after them (Ding Yihua 1910e). Thus, the rhetoric of “harmful cigarettes” was taken from its original context of personal hygiene and temperance and placed in the context of reforming individuals for the sake of the nation. In other words, Thwing’s anti-cigarette writings intended to evoke not only people’s motivation to guard their own lives based on self-interest, but also their patriotic sentiment, which might influence people’s behavior more effectively in an era when “the responsibilities of constitutional citizens” and “the salvation of the nation” were dominant ideas.

Thwing’s anti-cigarette writings also emphasized the economic argument that the Chinese national economy was undermined by the increasing import of foreign cigarettes, which drained the supply of cash. The economic argument was often phrased in Western anti-cigarette rhetoric as wasting individual wealth, but Chinese writers tended to highlight its impact on the national economy. For example, the Chinese author mentioned earlier who first introduced the Western knowledge of tobacco in 1899 suggested smoking native tobacco instead of imported cigars and cigarettes to save national wealth (Anonymous 1899). The Chinese translator of Exner’s China and the Cigarette added a similar economic argument in the postscript of its Chinese version. He claimed that wicked foreign cigarette companies exploited the Chinese people through this destructive and wasteful addiction, so he condemned the consumption of imported cigarettes for draining the country of cash (Exner 1910b, 25–27). In his anti-cigarette writings, Thwing emphasized the economic argument as much as the health argument and he also focused on the harm to the national economy. In “Save China’s Economy” (Jiuji Zhongguo de caizheng), he analyzed the loss of national wealth caused by cigarette smoking. He argued that even though individual consumption of cigarettes was trivial, the trivial waste of all the smokers in China could accumulate to a significant sum and thus would undermine the national economy (Ding Yihua 1910b). As Benjamin Schwartz shows in his book on Yan Fu, a famous translator and thinker in the late Qing and early Republican period, progressive Chinese elites at the turn of the century concerned themselves above all with the wealth and power of the nation as the essential factor for China’s ability to survive in the modern world (Schwartz 1964). The harm cigarette smoking did to smokers’ bodies would damage the power of the nation, while the consumption of imported cigarettes would waste the wealth of the nation. In this way, Thwing’s anti-cigarette campaign embodied contemporary anxiety over the destiny of the Chinese nation.

Thwing grounded his rhetoric primarily in the values and meanings with which his Chinese audience passionately identified. By doing this, he successfully persuaded a group of Chinese elites in Tianjin to share his aversion to cigarette smoking. They established an organization to reform Chinese people’s “uncivilized” social customs. Cigarette smoking was identified as one of the most repugnant practices, to be corrected first and immediately, together with foot binding (Anonymous 1910c). Nevertheless, Thwing’s efforts to launch an anti-cigarette campaign did not achieve much. For most Chinese people in Tianjin, cigarettes were just an emerging threat, with which they were still unfamiliar. Therefore, when Thwing changed his focus from cigarette smoking to the opium trade in the fall of 1910, his anti-cigarette campaign soon faded away. Despite the short life of his campaign, Thwing’s writings indicated a new direction for “hygienic modernity” in modern China—the idea that the individual practice of personal hygiene should serve as a valid approach to strengthening the nation.

From Guarding Life to Guarding the Nation: Wu Tingfang and the Anti-Cigarette Campaign in Shanghai

Wu Tingfang (1842–1922) retired from his position as ambassador to the United States and moved to Shanghai in late 1910. A legal and diplomatic expert educated in Hong Kong and Britain, Wu helped Li Hongzhang deal with foreign affairs and directed the legal reforms as vice minister of punishment (Xingbu shilang). After he retired from office, he remained engaged in social activities, among which was establishing the Society of Rational Diet and Hygiene (SRDH, Shenshi Weisheng Hui) to promote Western hygiene regimens.

As a devoted Christian educated in the West, Wu had been searching for many years for reliable practices of hygiene that differed from the traditional Chinese approach to “guarding life.” During his tenure as ambassador to the United States (1896–1902, 1907–1910), which coincided with the Progressive Era, he became acquainted with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) and Mrs. Mary Foote Henderson (1842–1931), both of whom enthusiastically advocated temperance and vegetarianism. John Kellogg was a leading figure in the promotion of holistic methods to achieve health in the United States at that time. His regimens included vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, abundant sunbathing, frequent exercise, and a rigid daily routine.¹² Mary Henderson, a rich and active social celebrity, promoted the temperance agenda in Washington, DC, and in her book The Aristocracy of Health.¹³ Wu found this book “an admirable work,” in which “the facts and arguments adduced against tobacco smoking, strong drink and poisonous foods, are set forth in such a clear and convincing manner” (Wu 1914, 200). He was completely convinced by Kellogg’s and Henderson’s hygienic regimens based on laboratory science and Christian temperance and followed them earnestly, soon obtaining satisfactory results.

Immediately after Wu Tingfang moved to Shanghai, he founded the SRDH to promote holistic regimens and a healthy diet among the Shanghai elite. Members of this small salonlike group included two Chinese doctors with Western medical training, Ding Fubao (1874–1952) and Yu Fengbin (1884–1930), and other prestigious members of the Shanghai local elite.¹⁴ As the name of this society suggests, the SRDH aimed to achieve the goal of weisheng through proper diet. This goal fit into the traditional practice of weisheng as guarding life, but in the SRDH, a Western-style diet based on newly introduced knowledge of nutrition and metabolism mixed with Christian temperance replaced the Chinese approach to “guarding life” based on correlative cosmology.

The SRDH opposed cigarette smoking first as part of its hygienic regimen. Ding Fubao published “Twenty-Three Practices Damaging Bodies” (Shangshen tiaojian ershisan tiao) in Dagong Bao on November 4, 1910. In this article, he suggested abstaining from cigarettes, water pipes, dry pipes, and opium due to their “poison of tobacco” (yandu). On April 20, 1911, the SRDH published an announcement in Shen Bao to invite people to discuss “the nature of tobacco and the harms [caused by tobacco consumption] to human bodies” at the next meeting of the SRDH, under the preexisting assumption that tobacco use—whether in pipes, cigars, or cigarettes—was poisonous. In this announcement, cigarettes were criticized no more than other forms of tobacco consumption. However, on May 3, the announcement of the SRDH in Shen Bao condemned only cigarettes as a harmful substance from which Chinese people should abstain. This announcement stated that Wu Tingfang had examined maritime customs records and found that the import of cigarettes had increased sharply in recent years, so he was concerned that in the future, these imports would drain more silver out of China than opium ever had. The economic argument thus seemed to be the primary motivation for Wu to narrow his focus from concern about tobacco consumption in general to cigarette smoking in particular. However, Wu did not emphasize the economic argument to the larger audience. Rather, the announcement claimed that the SRDH would establish the Anti-Cigarette Society to “publicize the harm [of cigarettes] to the lungs” to dissuade fellow Chinese from cigarette smoking.

A month later, on June 4, the SRDH organized an anti-cigarette meeting open to the general public at Zhang’s Garden. Speakers at the meeting were all prestigious local elites, including Wu Tingfang; Li Pingshu (1854–1927), the chair of the Shanghai Merchants’ Volunteer Corps; Shen Dunhe (1866–1920), the founder and vice-chair of the Chinese Red Cross Society; and Chen Runfu (1841–1919), the chair of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce (whose speech was read by another member of the SRDH, since he was sick).¹⁵ Their speeches condemned cigarette smoking from various perspectives: as undermining one’s health, draining cash from China, wasting household income, devaluing one’s social status, causing fire hazards, and so on (Shen Bao 1911a). Immediately after the first public anti-cigarette meeting, the Anti-Cigarette Society was founded, and Wu Tingfang was elected as its chairman.¹⁶ The society decided to organize additional gatherings and lectures and to publish popular writings in newspapers to advocate the anti-cigarette agenda among the common people (Shen Bao 1911b).

The Anti-Cigarette Society resorted to Western anti-cigarette rhetoric as a rich and conveniently available resource, despite the society’s different concerns and perception of cigarette smoking. At its first committee meeting, the Anti-Cigarette Society decided to use the Chinese translation of Dr. Exner’s China and the Cigarette to publicize the anti-cigarette agenda and immediately donated money to reprint this pamphlet in order to distribute it for free (Shen Bao 1911b). However, Western rhetoric was not reproduced directly. Ding Fubao wrote a long article entitled “On the Harmful Effects of Cigarettes” (Shuo zhiyan zhi hai) to summarize Exner’s pamphlet and had it serialized in Shen Bao and Dagong Bao. All the medical evidence in Ding’s article came from Exner’s treatise, and the structure of the article even resembled Exner’s, but Ding added economic and moral arguments in his reinterpretation of Exner’s treatise. He made some simple calculations to show that the sum of money spent on cigarettes by a large population would be so enormous that it was almost equal to the Boxer Indemnity and the national debt. So Ding argued that the seemingly trivial habit of cigarette smoking would lead to significant damage to the nation. He also claimed that cigarette smokers were as indecent as rickshaw pullers and servants in brothels, in order to devalue the social image of cigarettes (Ding Fubao 1911a and 1911b).

At almost the same time, Yu Fengbin, writing as Yu Qing’en, published an article entitled “On the Relationship between Tobacco and Hygiene” (Lun yancao yu weisheng zhi guanxi) in Shi Bao. His article was serialized over several days and consisted of three parts. In the first part, he quoted “Western and Eastern scholars’ opinions” (dong xi xuezhe zhi shuo), which were largely the quasi-scientific knowledge that mixed science with moral judgments, as commonly seen in Western anti-cigarette rhetoric.¹⁷ In the second part, he listed all the chemical components of tobacco and tobacco smoke based on laboratory experiments to prove the poisonous nature of tobacco. The third part was Yu’s own elaboration on the harms posed by tobacco use. He highlighted the harm of tobacco use to the lungs in particular, because lung diseases were common among the Chinese people at that time. He explained the physiology of the lungs in detail to illustrate how the inhalation of smoke would impair and weaken the lungs by making them more susceptible to germ infection and lung diseases (Yu 1911). Here, Yu Fengbin tried to dissuade his readers from smoking in order to prevent lung diseases. In this sense, he shared the same goal as “hygienic modernity” but approached it in a different way. Instead of advocating state-sponsored infrastructure and institutions of public health, he appealed to individuals to follow hygienic regimens to prevent infectious diseases so as to strengthen the nation.

In order to publicize the harm of cigarettes to the general public, especially to those less educated and less open to Western knowledge, the Anti-Cigarette Society encouraged its members to translate foreign knowledge into vernacular Chinese to inform ordinary people. During the high tide of the anti-cigarette campaign in Shanghai, which peaked in June and July 1911, anti-cigarette advocates published twelve pieces of popular writing and cartoons in the vernacular Humor Supplement of Shi Bao (Huaji shibao). In these popular writings and drawings, the harm of cigarette smoking was taken as an indisputable truth, and the assertions about poisonous cigarettes in these writings were often mixed with inaccurate details and Chinese folk knowledge.

A ballad written in the Suzhou dialect was a typical piece of writing for less-educated readers. This ballad of 863 characters was deliberately written in Suzhou dialect so that it could be used to lecture illiterate local people, a method frequently used to educate and mobilize the lower classes on the eve of the 1911 Revolution.¹⁸ It listed seven problems caused by cigarette smoking:

The first is a small but annoying problem. Cigarette ash that falls onto your clothes will change their color. Second, five cents per package [of cigarettes] is not cheap. Consuming two boxes daily costs 4000 cents a month.¹⁹ Third, if you drop a cigarette butt carelessly into piles of paper or firewood, it can be very dangerous. Fourth, social interaction is important for business, so people start smoking cigarettes for its convenience [in social activities], without knowing it is more addictive than opium. Five, tobacco [in cigarettes] is mixed with raw opium, and the paper used to wrap cigarettes is made with drugs. If you hold a cigarette in your mouth all the time, how can you avoid poisoning your lungs? Six, smoking for a long time will induce epilepsy [dianxian]. Mr. Ding who lives in Shouchang Lane [e.g., Ding Fubao] wrote a long article on the poisonous nature of tobacco. What he says about the toxin of tobacco is very accurate. Seven, fever with rotten throat [lanhousha] [probably “scarlet fever” in Western medicine] occurs frequently. Doctors all think it is caused by the fire poison [e.g., the poison of cigarettes]. This disease causes even more fatalities than the plague.

(Anonymous 1911a)

In this ballad, smokers’ health was not the only reason to quit cigarette smoking, but rather one of many concerns in people’s daily lives. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh points, all related to health, the author used inaccurate and misleading evidence: some of this evidence came from Western anti-cigarette literature, like the claim that opium and drugs were added to cigarettes, and some came from Chinese medical knowledge, like the claim that the “fire poison” of cigarettes would cause “rotten throat fever.” This part of the ballad was based on both Western and Chinese sources and mixed both truth and myth, but the author claimed validity for the information based on the authoritative stature of the medical expert Ding Fubao.

Jin Weiwen, a member of the Anti-Cigarette Society, wrote a similar vernacular ballad, “New Ballad to Discourage Cigarette Smoking” (Quanjie xiangyan xin ge), which was published in Huaji Shibao on July 5, 1911. This ballad highlighted the harmfulness of cigarette smoking to “hygiene” (weisheng) in particular:

All types of cigarettes are extremely detrimental to your hygiene. You need to be careful about it [smoking] especially during the summertime. Smoking cigarettes frequently can hurt your bodies. Hot smoke entering your mouth is where the damage starts. There is another theory that [cigarettes are] made of morphine, so inhaling cigarette smoke will have a detrimental effect on your brain. Fever with rotten throat [which cigarette smoking supposedly induces] is raging now, and everybody is scared of this epidemic. Rich smokers can buy medicine to cure the disease, but poor [smokers] will suffer from it. Those who like smoking cigarettes are like muddled drunkards. Why not listen to the lectures available in many places? There is an imperial commissioner [e.g., Wu Tingfang] who is very famous. He is an expert in hygiene. In order to save people, he strives to persuade them. He walks to lecture the people in person regardless of bad weather. He takes the trouble to discourage you from cigarette smoking so that you can avoid unnecessary spending and fulfill your future career potential. Peddlers are busy doing business; students and teachers are busy with their studies. [For these busy people,] inhaling the poison of tobacco into lungs will lead to serious problems. Women in their chambers and monks in their monasteries should quit smoking in particular to avoid the bad smell of tobacco. Craftsmen and peasants should also take this advice. Rickshaw pullers and palanquin porters often exhaust the strength of their bones working at night, so they are vulnerable to various diseases; their lives are even more difficult to protect if they are poisoned by tobacco. Quitting smoking immediately will be more effective than taking medicine. You need to cherish your lives in the summer. The best method is abstaining from smoking.

(Jin 1911)

Here, the author took the poison of tobacco as a given fact backed by “the expert in hygiene,” Wu Tingfang. What the author elaborated on was how cigarette smoking hurt people in the specific circumstances of various professions, which fit the epistemology of traditional Chinese medicine that the effects of certain substances depended on individuals’ particular conditions. The author also defined quitting smoking as a way to prevent disease, equivalent to medicine. This understanding revealed the influence of the traditional practice of guarding life through proper diet and lifestyle.

In both ballads, the Western origin of knowledge about the harm of cigarettes was blurred. The harm of cigarette smoking was instead articulated within the framework of Chinese traditional medicine, using popular Chinese terms such as “fever with rotten throat” (lanhousha), “poison of fire” (huodu), and “strength of bones” (guli). In these popular writings, the authors cited Chinese notables Ding Fubao and Wu Tingfang as reliable sources of information, instead of emphasizing the information’s Western origins, as Ding Fubao and Yu Fengbin had done in their writings. This indicated an attempt to indigenize Western knowledge about the harms of cigarettes in order to make this information easier for ordinary Chinese people to accept.

Like Thwing’s campaign in Tianjin, the anti-cigarette campaign in Shanghai also took advantage of the political discourse of constitutionalism and patriotism prevalent in China on the eve of the 1911 Revolution. For example, one anti-cigarette ballad read, “Sincerely tell our compatriots, brothers, to quit cigarette smoking, so as to boost our economy, strengthen our politics, and avoid the loss of [our national] interests and rights (liquan). Your action will make a significant contribution and [prove your] completely new character, so that you can be regarded as civilized (kaitong)” (Xiaoshi 1911). The health-based anti-cigarette campaign was also integrated into the burgeoning citizen soldiery movement (jun guomin yundong) in Shanghai, because of the belief “that a soldier who smokes so injures his health that he will be unfit to perform his duties to the best of his abilities” (Anonymous 1911b). The National Merchants’ Volunteer Corps, the major military force in Shanghai, was a Chinese militia organized by local elites. Its commander gave anti-cigarette speeches to the members of the corps and lent the drilling field of the corps to the Anti-Cigarette Society for public lectures against cigarette smoking.

The loss of national wealth caused by the import of cigarettes was also a key theme in almost all the anti-cigarette writings in Shanghai, just as it was in the Chinese translations of Western anti-cigarette rhetoric and in Thwing’s anti-cigarette writings. This economic argument against cigarette smoking, which appealed to people’s nationalist sentiment rather than their concern about health, worried some foreign observers in Shanghai. As an article in the North China Herald on June 17, 1911 commented:

There is no doubt that the Chinese gentlemen … have been animated solely by health reasons; but signs are not wanting that the other[s] interested in it may have ulterior motives. Thus, the citizen soldiery movement is being made use of to further the anti-smoking crusade, and the “China for the Chinese” idea has been brought very prominently to the front in all their doings.

(Anonymous 1911b)

This commentator agreed with the anti-cigarette advocates’ intention to protect Chinese soldiers from the harm of smoking, but he was also concerned about the potential of this campaign to evolve into an anti-foreign boycott. A Chinese commentator responded to this challenge swiftly in Shi Bao:

Even women and children understand [that] quitting cigarette smoking will be beneficial. … In contemporary China, when industry is not fully developed, when extravagance prevails, when the [national] interests and rights are lost to foreigners, and the future [of China] is terrible, “thrift” is probably not a bad strategy to solve the problem. As for those who speak for cigarette companies, I don’t know about their morality.

(Hui 1911)

Here, the economic argument was added to the health argument to oppose cigarette smoking without hesitation. Transnational anti-cigarette rhetoric was revised to address the specific Chinese situation and to express the nationalist sentiment prevalent in China at the time. The original call for guarding life in the agenda of the SRDH turned out to be an attempt to guard the nation.

Compared with the anti-cigarette campaign launched by the former American missionary Edward Thwing, this similar campaign in Shanghai was much more successful in the sense that it attracted more attention and a larger response from both the government and society. After the Anti-Cigarette Society was established in Shanghai in early June 1911, a news report in Dagong Bao on June 30 said that the minister of finance, Zaize, had asked the minister of foreign affairs to meet with foreign ambassadors in Beijing to discuss the possibility of increasing the tariff on imported cigarettes. Considering that Zaize was Wu Tingfang’s friend and a reformist himself, his proposal might have been influenced by Wu. Through its elite members, the SRDH sent a letter to the police office of the Shanghai Self-Governing Bureau (Zizhi Gongsuo) to ask policemen patrolling the streets to stop children from smoking cigarettes (Shi Bao 1911a). A letter from the Education Bureau of Jiangsu Province to the Education Department of Shanghai was published in Shi Bao on July 7 to reiterate the regulation that smoking was forbidden in schools (Shi Bao 1911b). On July 13, Shi Bao published a news report from Beijing claiming that the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Trade ordered all provinces to report the total number of cigarettes imported every year so as to find solutions to curb their import. The sudden interest of the government in cigarettes at the height of the anti-cigarette campaign in Shanghai was probably not a coincidence. Wu Tingfang’s status as a retired high official with a broad social network in the government likely played an essential role here.

The anti-cigarette campaign in Shanghai also had a greater impact on society due to its advocates’ higher social status. According to news reports in Shi Bao, after the first public anti-cigarette meeting on June 4, 1911, the Anti-Cigarette Society arranged at least three more public lectures in June and July.²⁰ The meeting on July 11 was attended by more than a thousand people, and almost half of them joined the society as a result (Shi Bao 1911c). More anti-cigarette talks were given in the existing voluntary associations in Shanghai, such as the Association of Seven Towns in Jiangning and the Jade Guild (Shen Bao 1911c). The burgeoning public sphere and its increasing opportunities for engaging in public activities in Shanghai on the eve of the 1911 Revolution provided a social environment that facilitated the promotion of the anti-cigarette agenda, especially when this agenda was integrated into nationalist and reformist discourses.

According to a contemporary observer’s memoir, the anti-cigarette campaign in Shanghai effectively inhibited the fashion for cigarette smoking and increased the sale of native tobacco leaves for pipes for a short period of time (Zhu 1913, 35–36). However, the 1911 Revolution in the fall ended the campaign prematurely, because its major proponents, now devoting themselves to the momentous political changes, no longer had time to worry about the comparatively trivial habit of smoking. The ensuing regime change also resulted in a shift of social elites. As one of the major anti-cigarette advocates, Li Pingshu, recalled, few people smoked cigarettes in the streets by early September; however, many revolutionary leaders were cigarette smokers and the revolutionary general in Shanghai, Chen Qimei, even used cigarettes to entertain his guests, so cigarettes inevitably became popular once again after the revolution in October (Li Pingshu 1989, 63).

Conclusion

As Ruth Rogaski argues in her Hygienic Modernity, John Fryer’s translations on hygiene played an important transitional role in “weisheng’s shift toward the laboratory and away from correlative cosmology” (Rogaski 2004, 19). However, she also points out that Fryer’s translations on weisheng emphasized the importance of individual conduct and morality much as did the traditional Chinese idea and practice of “guarding life” and failed to deliver the modern Western idea of public health (2004, 131). The Euro-American anti-tobacco rhetoric derived from the development of laboratory science and the rise of the temperance movement in the late nineteenth century shared the same epistemological foundation and moral concern found in John Fryer’s translations on hygiene. This new perception of the harms of cigarette smoking was a mix of science with morality and religion. It entered China through translations supported by the Chinese YMCA and conveniently fit into the niche of knowledge created by Fryer in the 1880s.

The moral core of late nineteenth-century Euro-American anti-tobacco rhetoric consisted of both Christian temperance ideals and a global concern for racial strength, a concern based on contemporary social Darwinism. As a result, juvenile smoking was condemned in particular in the anti-cigarette writings translated and published by the Chinese YMCA. The connection between the individual behavior of cigarette smoking and the fitness of the nation was implied, though not fully articulated, in these translations.

When the former American missionary Edward Thwing launched his anti-cigarette campaign in Tianjin in early 1910, he borrowed quasi-scientific Western knowledge about the harm of cigarette smoking and added extra moral meaning to the discourse of hygiene to dissuade the Chinese from smoking cigarettes. In his writings, personal hygiene was not only an integral part of traditional Confucian moral doctrines but also an essential part of modern citizenship in a constitutional state. Against this framework of moralized hygiene, quitting cigarette smoking thus became a deliberate civil action through which individuals achieved their citizenship.

In the summer of 1911, the retired high official Wu Tingfang initiated another anti-cigarette campaign. This campaign originated with the concern of Wu and his friends about health, but the real driving force lay in their anxiety over the potential for the increasing import of cigarettes to undermine the national economy. Thus, nationalist sentiment was added to the anti-cigarette rhetoric based on personal hygiene. In order to appeal to a lower-class, illiterate population, anti-cigarette advocates in Shanghai published popular writings to inform this sector of the harms of cigarette smoking to health, daily life, household economy, and the national economy. In these writings, campaign proponents avoided expressing foreign knowledge directly; instead, they combined it with native sources and concepts with which the common people were more familiar. The imported anti-cigarette rhetoric was further indigenized to adapt to Chinese contexts.

From the translation of Western anti-cigarette rhetoric to the active campaigns against cigarette smoking in Tianjin and Shanghai, this seemingly trivial personal habit was redefined as a behavior that could have a significant impact on the nation. As a result, a closer bond between individuals and the nation was constructed. According to Thwing and the Shanghai elites’ anti-cigarette rhetoric, individuals could serve the nation in their everyday lives by reforming their undesirable habits so as to realize their responsibility as qualified citizens. In this sense, these anti-cigarette campaigns embodied the project of bodily engineering that disciplined and transformed individual bodies to increase the wealth and power of the nation in early twentieth-century China.

The looming 1911 Revolution was thus not an irrelevant backdrop, but an essential precondition for the occurrence of the anti-cigarette campaigns. The political awareness, nationalist sentiment, and social activism cultivated in this highly politically charged moment provided the Chinese anti-cigarette campaigns with momentum and a moral purpose. Under these circumstances, social elites (including reformist foreigners like Edward Thwing) modified the imported anti-cigarette rhetoric to address specifically Chinese problems such as constitutionalism, trade deficits, and nation building. Through this anti-cigarette rhetoric, the constructed connection between people’s daily lives and grand sociopolitical agendas helped instill into people’s minds a sense of citizenship and social responsibility, which would facilitate the mobilization and engagement of the people in the coming revolution.