Diagnosing Minorities: Anti-Syphilis Campaigns and Nation-state Building on the Inner Asian Frontiers of China, 1949-1964

Abstract

This dissertation examines how and why the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched a massive-scale STD control program, officially termed “Ethnic Health” (Minzu weisheng), among the ethnic minority peoples in Inner Mongolia, eastern Tibet (Kham and Amdo), and Xinjiang from the 1950s through mid-1960s. Drawing on archival documents, government publications, medical writings, newspapers, memoirs, and oral history interviews, this research shows how the medical teams dispatched from Beijing and provincial capitals carried out anti-syphilis campaigns among the diverse minority communities on the Inner Asian frontiers of China. My research suggests that the Ethnic Health program embodied the PRC’s medicalized and sexualized approach to “seeing” and governing Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minority peoples in the peripheral regions. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the early PRC state launched a biopolitical campaign to bolster regime legitimacy and, more importantly, incorporate Inner Asian minority groups into the emerging Han-centered socialist nation-state. Even though the Ethnic Health program was devised to promote health and elevate the status of the Inner Asian minority population, the program failed to achieve its desired effects and, on the contrary, further marginalized ethnic minorities in the cultural and political realm of Mao-era China.