In October 2017 Lu Chen joined CGHH as the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities PhD studentship. Lu is researching smallpox eradication in post-war China, focusing on how was smallpox eradication conceived, planned and delivered in China, and what international, regional, national and local political negotiations made success possible.
Lu writes: "In the US-and Western Europe-centric historiographical context on international and global health, China gets only short treatment. Different to many of its neighbouring countries where smallpox was still epidemic in 1950s, the Chinese smallpox eradication work did not rely on US assistance, had nominal links with WHO structures and budgets, and was, instead, built mainly upon a raft of bilateral aid agreements with the Soviet Union, the USSR’s Eastern European allies and, latterly, politically neutral Western European countries like Sweden. These international links provided vaccine, vaccinating kits and the transfer of vaccine production technologies. China’s government worked to its own timetables, independently gauging the value of international political alliances, and agreed to aid flows and involvement of overseas workers through very specific terms. In all this, Chinese representatives engaged the UN, the WHO, and the US and Western European aid agencies in distinctive ways, and only as and when they regarded it useful to do so (and, when internal politics allowed it). My research will investigate all these programmatic complexities independently and critically."
We look forward to hearing how the project progresses and would like to take this opportunity to welcome Lu to CGHH!
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