Department of History book panel discussion: Dr Xun Zhou and Professor Steve Smith 

Dr Xun Zhou, author of The People’s Health. Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao’s China 1949-1983, will be joined by Professor Steve Smith to dicuss the findings of her new book.

In 1949 the Chinese Communists embarked on a new health policy in China which was supposed to be different to that of National China, but also would make the People’s Republic of China a showcase in progress and modernity. The regime declared war on Schistosomiasis, an endemic disease in several parts of China.

Zhou’s analysis demonstrates how close public health policies and political aims of the regime to control the countryside and to consolidate power were entangled. Drawing on hitherto unknown archival sources from provincial archives and oral history interviews with doctors and activists she also shows how limited the campaign of the Chinese communist party in many ways was, and that the war against the disease was not won by centralised top-down leadership, but rather with alternative forms of medical measures embodied by the ‘barefoot doctors’ program.

Dr Zhou will discuss her findings and theses with Prof Steve Smith who is an eminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, but also worked on Chinese history and published widely about comparisons between the Soviet Russia and Communist China.