IAS Talking Points: The Cholera Pandemic, the Transnational Politics, and the Cold War...

Join the IAS to hear Visiting Research Fellow Dr Xiaoping Fang with responses from Dr Vivienne Lo  and Dr Andrew Wear.

Until the late 1950s, the cholera caused by the El Tor Vibrio cholerae was confined to endemic foci on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), where it had broken out four times between 1937 and 1945. At the end of the 1950s, the Indonesian Sukarno government maneuvered its troops between Makassar and Sulawesi to suppress an internal rebellion, then in May 1959 it issued a decree to revoke the trading licenses of aliens in rural areas. Further policy changes came in January 1960, when the Indonesian and Chinese governments signed the Treaty on Dual Citizenship between Indonesia and China. These events unexpectedly caused both domestic and transnational mobility on a large scale. Another outcome was the spread of El Tor cholera, which escalated from an endemic disease into a global pandemic. This paper discusses Indonesian Chinese and the cholera pandemic in Southeast Asia and China and analyzes the disease and its mobility in the context of transnational politics in the early 1960s. It further examines how the Chinese government maneuvered the politics of pandemic from its standpoint as an isolated nation in the global health community during the Cold War.

Bio

Xiaoping Fang is Assistant Professor of Chinese History in School of Humanities of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His current research interests focus on the history of medicine, health and disease in twentieth-century China. He is the author of Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012). His articles appeared in the China Quarterly and Modern Asian Studies. He is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled “The Global Pandemic in Mao’s China: Disease and Mobility between the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.”

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