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

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.