Social Science Research Council

“Chasing Snails: Anti-Schistosomiasis Campaigns in the People’s Republic of China”

Using a case study approach in the Shanghai vicinity and in Yujiang County, Jiangxi Province, this study will unearth what really happened during the model 1956-59 Anti-Schistosomiasis campaign and determine its implications for current health crises.  In addition, the repeated smaller schistosomiasis campaigns from 1959 to the present will also be explored to examine the trajectory of rural public health efforts from their height during the Mao Zedong era, to their increasing neglect in the current profit-oriented health system. 

Although this campaign exuberantly claimed the complete elimination of schistosomiasis, three years after the campaign’s conclusion a renewed epidemic was flourishing again.  What really happened on the ground during this campaign?  How did local cadre negotiate impassioned demands for action from superiors who simultaneously supplied minimal funding or direction for how to conduct the campaign?  This campaign also introduced science and western public health among a rural population who had never encountered anything like them before.  What were popular interactions with scientific processes such as "scientific planning", standardization, quantification, and attempts at instilling an experimental culture at the bottom level?  Given a population that had a deep knowledge and attachment to Chinese medicine, what was the response to Western medical paradigms?  Finally in the 1950s, China’s 10 million schistosomiasis sufferers not only experienced such enervation they could not effectively work, but also were often infertile; two phenomena that greatly impacted on familial dynamics.  This campaign offers an excellent opportunity to discover how a disease affected the social ecology of a region, and then post-campaign to analyze ensuing alterations in family and village relationships.