Narrating health and well-being: moral regulation and the construction of cultural knowledge in Hong Kong and Canton, 1919-1939

Abstract

This paper explores how ideas of health and well-being were articulated in the Chinese popular press in colonial Hong Kong and Republican Canton from 1919 to 1939. The aim is to trace the connection between the regulation of conducts and the construction of cultural knowledge that involved the participation of diverse constituencies across two interconnected territories. Although the 1920s saw the arrival of municipal reform in Canton with the enactment of new pubic health legislation, the shift towards a new urban milieu of a 'sanitary city' was facilitated by a host of moralizing practices that took place at multiple sites and scales. An examination of the articles in the Chinese press in this period reveals a startling degree of obsession with personal health that ranges from the improvement of diet and body postures to the design of clothing, furniture and residential dwellings. While these works appropriated many key terms and images taken from European sources, they often combined elements drawn from Chinese traditions, infusing their narratives simultaneously with a nationalistic tint and boost of regional identity. By attending to the competing moral claims in these works and the cross-pollination of ideas, this paper illustrates a dialogic process through which an increasing number of Chinese participated in a new mode of (self)governance. This study will also shed light on the growing influence of the eugenics discourse in East Asia amidst ongoing colonial capitalist expansion and rising nationalism, as well as the formation of epistemic communities that traversed unevenly across national borders.