Paper Discussion: 'Revolutionary Vision: Myopia, Socialist Youth and Public Health Campaigns in China (1960-1976)’
Yixue Yang (University of California, San Diego)
Discussant: Dora Vargha (Humboldt University Berlin)
Yixue's paper may be downloaded from the website here. Please do not circulate the paper, as it is a work in progress.
Abstract: My paper starts with a set of eye massaging exercises that all students in China’s primary schools and high schools must do at class intervals today. Upon hearing the eye-exercise music from classroom loudspeakers, students close their eyes and follow the steps to self-massage certain acupoints on their faces with their hands for around ten minutes. Those who keep their eyes open are punished by inspectors on patrol. Based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, these eye exercises purport that myopia can be prevented and even cured by regular practice.
I trace this ongoing nationwide practice to its origin in the early 1960s at the height of China’s socialist construction. While urging people to work on increasing productivity in the heavy industry, the Communist leadership also mobilized all imaginable members of the socieety to join public health work by preventing myopia among students, who have been exalted as the “successors to socialism” in Communist rhetoric. In the year 1960, the central government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched the Protecting Students’ Eyesight Campaign which quickly swept across the whole country. State agents at various administrative levels mandated hygienic guidelines to improve schools’ built environment for better lighting. Meanwhile, students’ personal habits of seeing, reading, and resting in the classroom and at home fell under close government scrutiny. Parents, especially mothers, were also mobilized as indispensable partners in carrying out the state’s goal at home. In addition, medical experts collaborated with state agents in popularizing ophthalmological knowledge and devising Chinese-medicine-based eye exercises.
Complementing state directives with ample grassroots visual and textual propaganda materials from the Campaign, this study finds that in the 1960s and 1970s the PRC state continued to pursue what historian Ruth Rogaski calls “hygienic modernity.” Rogaski shows that in the shadow of imperialism, Chinese elites in treatyport Tianjin during the first half of the twentieth century pursued nationalist goals through modern biomedical approaches under the all-encompassing rubric of public health to “improve” the indigenous body and the built environment. While no imperialist power remained in China in 1960, the notion of indigenous bodily vulnerability lingered and was reactivated by new Communist elites during the Campaign.
Also, the Campaign transcended the immediate public health goal of reducing myopic cases among Chinese students. More fundamentally, it aimed at disciplining youth who were both the hope for and the danger to the Communist Revolution. Unlike the mechanism of other public health campaigns during the Mao era (1949-76), myopia neither had visible carriers for people to kill nor was it an infectious disease that could be bioengineered away with vaccines. As the Campaign developed, the state increasingly blamed the students for how they “misused” their eyes and their lack of political consciousness. In other words, promotors of the Campaign regarded the students as the carries of pathogen of myopia, which jeopardized socialist construction. From the perspective of the PRC leadership, young people’s dangerous propensities of using their eyes had to be suppressed and even preempted for them to be qualified “successors to socialism.”
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