Micah Muscolino interviews Mary Brazelton, a historian of science, technology and medicine, on mass mobilizations to battle epidemics, medical diplomacy, and vaccines as tools of political control before and after 1949. They discuss the implications of those historical developments on how China and Taiwan managed Covid-19, the current usage of data collection and surveillance in the name of public health, the resistance against compulsory vaccinations, and how the PRC and ROC influence global health policy.
This episode is an extended interview adapted from the China Throughlines web series, which features UC San Diego’s China historians in conversation with their colleagues on the echos and connectedness of China’s storied past to the twenty-first century.
Mary Augusta Brazelton is University Lecturer in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Her book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China, examines the history of mass immunization in twentieth-century China. She earned her PhD in History from Yale University and have taught at Tufts University.
Micah Muscolino is Professor and Paul G. Pickowicz Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History at UC San Diego. His research focuses on the environmental history of modern China. His first book, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, explored the environmental history of China’s most important marine fishery/ His second book The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950 engaged with the historiography of war and militarization in modern China and the interdisciplinary scholarship on war and the environment in world history. He received his B.A. from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Web series host: Micah Muscolino, UC San Diego
Editor: Samuel Tsoi, UC San Diego
Music: Dave Liang/Shanghai Restoration Project