Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

The concept of Hygienic Modernity has been proposed for about 20 years. This talk takes the Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) poisoning event in Taiwan in the Cold War period as an example to revisit this well-known concept in the modern history of East Asia. The PCBs are incurable industrial toxicants and have caused environmental pollution and food poisoning from the U.S. to East Asia since the 1970s. I argue that this pollution in Taiwan was a transformative point when industrial toxicants became modern hygienic issues, and the integration of Chinese medicine and biomedicine treatments for PCBs became a new kind of modernity in the 1980s. Moreover, the Kuomintang (KMT) government constructed this integrated therapeutic method to tackle the hygienic and societal disorders caused by Western industrial modernity.

In the late period of the Cold War, difficult political situations at home and abroad posed the KMT government with numerous social movements in Taiwan. During the outbreak of PCBs poisonings and the following grassroots consumerism campaigns, Li-Fu Chen, an influential KMT politician, promoted the integration of Chinese medicine and biomedicine for PCBs therapy beneath the official propaganda of the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement (1966-1991). Interdisciplinary teams conducted both animal experiments and clinical trials to validate the therapeutic effectiveness of this project. Although the long-term outcome of Chinese medicine treatment was unsatisfactory, this project benefited the KMT government’s three political goals: alleviated societal panic, propagated Taiwan’s medical achievements to the West, and institutionalized the integration of Chinese medicine and biomedicine.