The Manchurian Plague and COVID-19: China, the United States, and the "Sick Man," Then and Now.

In this article, I explore the historical resonances between China's 1911 pneumonic plague and our current situation with COVID-19. At the turn of the 20th century, China was labeled "the Sick Man of the Far East": a once-powerful country that had become burdened by opium addiction, infectious disease, and an ineffective government. In 1911, this weakened China faced an outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria that killed more than 60 000 people. After the 1911 plague, a revolutionized China radically restructured its approach to public health to eliminate the stigma of being "the Sick Man." Ironically, given the US mishandling of the COVID pandemic, observers in today's China are now calling the United States "the Sick Man of the West": a country burdened by opioid addiction, infectious disease, and an ineffective government. The historical significance of the phrase "Sick Man"-and its potential to now be associated with the United States-highlights the continued links between epidemic control and international status in a changing world. This historical comparison also reveals that plagues bring not only tragedy but also the opportunity for change.

Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China. By Mary Augusta Brazelton,. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019. 258 pp. ISBN: 9781501739989 (cloth)

While Mass Vaccination joins a growing body of scholarship on medical developments in the Chinese hinterlands during World War II—including works by Wayne Soon, John Watt, and Nicole Barnes—Brazelton smartly reminds us that Yunnan had its own complex public health history before the arrival of the KMT government. The incredible hardships faced by Chinese “refugee researchers” under wartime conditions are vividly portrayed: starvation wages, lack of equipment, air raids that shattered labs. In the face of these hardships, Chinese scientists successfully acquired international aid and improvised brilliantly with materials at hand, using soybean sprout juice, the bodies of live silkworms, and contraband Japanese agar to grow bacterial cultures. [...]of the militarization of society, submitting to vaccination was not only a medical act: it was at once patriotic and political.