Dr. Yubin Shen (Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai)

This talk will introduce my current research project that uses malaria as a case study to explore the making of tropical medicine in the first half of twentieth-century China. The project argues that tropical medicine’s emergence as a distinct discipline in China resulted from complicated interrelations of different groups of participants, including Chinese Nationalist central and provincial governments, the US government, international organizations, medical missionaries, physicians and agricultural specialists. By illuminating their multifaceted experience in promoting Chinese tropical medicine, it challenges dominant paradigms that treat developments in modern medicine in non-western countries as “tools of empire” used solely for imperial expansion or legitimating forms of “colonial modernity.”