Making Sense of the Air in China’s Socialist Industrialisation: producing and communicating airborne hazards, 1949–1976

Description du projet

Redéfinir le risque aérien dans la Chine ancienne

Dans les premières années de la République populaire de Chine, la relation entre l’air, la santé et la productivité a été redéfinie par l’industrialisation dirigée par l’État. À mesure que les usines et les mines sont devenues des points centraux pour la gestion des risques environnementaux et sanitaires, le domaine émergent de l’hygiène industrielle a pris de l’importance. Cependant, le développement de ce régime scientifique reste peu étudié. Soutenu par le programme Actions Marie Skłodowska-Curie, le projet SENSEAIR fournira la première analyse historique de la santé au travail en Chine. En examinant les documents politiques, la propagande et la littérature scientifique, il explorera la manière dont les nouvelles conceptions des risques liés à l’air ont remodelé la santé publique et la sécurité des travailleurs. Cette recherche éclaire le passé de la Chine et alimente les récits sur la santé mondiale, en offrant des perspectives sur l’intersection de la science, du travail et du changement politique.

Objectif

This action will provide the first historical analysis of occupational health work in a Chinese context. It will focus on changing understandings of airborne risk, illustrating how state-led industrialisation efforts introduced new ways of knowing and controlling dangerous particles in the air and how these were communicated amongst experts and to lay publics. It will analyse policy documents, educational propaganda, popular science magazines, and scientific journals related to the field of industrial hygiene to investigate how this field became an important context for reconceptualisations of the air and its relationship to the body. Industrial hygiene grew into a prominent area of public health in the early People's Republic of China, with workplaces like factories and mines designated as sites for managing health-related and environmental concerns. The emergence of industrial hygiene as a scientific regime for organising people, production, and environments in twentieth-century China has not yet been studied by historians. In centring this field, the action will reveal how the control of infectious disease, dust-related occupational disease, and emerging knowledge about pollution developed alongside new understandings of the air as well as of worker productivity. Addressing a major gap in histories of modern China, it will demonstrate the crucial role of the industrial workplace as a site for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. By studying conceptualisations of airborne pathology in the unique setting of socialist China, it will offer novel insights into how the communication of knowledge about risk was reconciled with radical political and economic goals. The action will integrate the history of medicine with histories of labour and environmental histories, making possible an understanding of China’s role in past, present, and future global health events in relation to broader ideological, economic, and cultural shifts.