ABSTRACT
On March 3 1952, a Chinese villager living about 20 kilometres from the city of Fushun discovered something curious in front of his house: insects that were jumping and walking on the snow. Immediately he alerted the local authorities, who, suspecting foul play, sought to destroy the insects. After several days, the authorities had failed to eradicate insects from the area – they now inhabited a space more than a kilometre long and 500 metres wide and were impinging on the city of Fushun. Seeing this as a plot by the American military as a way to turn the tide in the Korean War, the Chinese authorities accused the Americans of engaging in biological warfare, intent on contaminating Chinese cities with disease-carrying insects. The Chinese accusations prompted an international investigation, as a team of French, German, and British scientists travelled to north-east China to study the veracity of the claims of biological warfare. This chapter examines how images of the “global city” shaped the discourse surrounding biological warfare during the early part of the Cold War. Both the Chinese officials and the international investigators invoked the destruction of cities – Hiroshima and Nagasaki in particular, but also during the Second World War – as ways to advance their platforms and causes. But the city also became a central place to wage defence against biological warfare: it became a site to mobilize mass vaccination campaigns, eradicate epidemics, and implement new practices of hygiene. This paper thus investigates how the city served as a central node for the circulation of global health practices and ideas during the Cold War.
