During the early years of the Republic, many
reformist thinkers tried to fathom why Chinese were not respected by
foreigners. One of these thinkers was Sun Yatsen,
who was convinced that "competent governance of the body's natural
functions" was a "necessary condition for competent government". As
long as Chinese were "lacking in personal culture", they would not be
respected. Sun and others called for an end to the practice of growing
fingernails to an unseemly length, they advocated regular brushing of
the teeth, criticised the practice of farting at will, and tried to
educate the people that hawking and spitting was simply "not done".
Keeping oneself tidy became part of a new style of personal
self-management that was considered essential to show the world that
the Chinese people had woken up.
The stress on personal hygiene remained an important
aspect of raising the Chinese consciousness during the 1930s and 1940s.
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, education in
hygiene was stepped up even further, often in the form of Patriotic Hygiene
Campaigns, the first of which took place in 1952. Observing hygienic
rules even came to be seen as patriotic. The eradication of diseases
and the public and private behavior or conditions that caused them was
considered equally important as national construction, ferretting out counterrevolutionaries and
class enemies, or making revolution, to establish the identity of New
China. This often took the form of mass campaigns, such as the
Eradicate Four Pests Movement (chu si hai yundong) during the Great Leap Forward, and the various schistosomiasis eradication campaigns that took place in 1955-1959.
In the early 1980s, personal hygiene was again
equated with a sense of having culture. Moreover, due to the changes
that were taking place in the political arena and the economy with Deng Xiaoping
taking over, there was a general feeling that from that point on,
things would be handled differently. This idea was strengthened by the
spate of posters produced in those years that showed people (usually
women and children) cleaning windows. It almost seemed to indicate that
all things – including politics – would become more
transparent, more visible.
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The use of symbols pointing to type of political
hygiene was quickly replaced by a more regular approach. Posters
showing children washing their hands almost became a standard subject
of the educational posters aimed at inculcating Socialist Spiritual Civilization.
Another type of unhygienic behavior that was addressed frequently in
propaganda posters was spitting, but without apparent success: even in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the fight against hawking and spitting continued unabated.
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In the 1990s and beyond, the calls for personal
hygiene, relatively safe from a political perspective, have continued.
They remain part and parcel of the Socialist Spiritual Civilization
campaigns, which are periodically directed at primary and secondary
school students. The prevention of further outbreaks of SARS and avian flu have made personal and animal
hygiene of the utmost importance, however, for the population at large.
Sources:
John Fitzgerald, Awakening China—Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998)
Ruth Rogaski, "Nature, Annihilation, and Modernity: China's Korean War Germ-Warfare Experience Reconsidered", Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61, no. 2 (May 2002), pp. 381-415
Nianqun Yang, "Disease Prevention, Social Mobilization and Spatial
Politics: The Anti Germ-Warfare Incident of 1952 and the 'Patriotic
Health Campaign'", The Chinese Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 2004), pp. 155-182
s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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