Disease control in China: The curious centrality of evil animals and mass campaigns

Abstract

This paper explores the Chinese Communist Party's choice to use a unique public health model that combined mass mobilisation campaigns with the effort to eradicate harmful or evil creatures. Mass campaigns created an all-encompassing environment that ensured participation and also functioned well in conditions of administrative and medical scarcity. Within mass campaigns, the Party turned evil animals and eventually evil people into surrogates for the invisible worlds of diseases. This decision allowed the government to conduct campaigns that empowered the people while validating Party efforts at national transformation and scientific uplift at the grassroots level. The choice to substitute the seen for the unseen, however, had definite repercussions, leading to exceptionally arduous and frequently misdirected public health work, environmental damage and devastation for human targets. Despite vast changes in Chinese society in the Reform era (1978 to now) that mainly phased out mass campaigns, the Party nonetheless revitalised them as part of fighting SARS and Covid-19. It appears that Maoist-era strategies have become ritualised as mass performances that act as a social and political panacea: mass effort enacting traditional health activities ensures victory; and the government's decision to conduct mass campaigns signals its serious commitment, which requires and thus legitimates paternalistic and authoritarian control measures to succeed.