Scientising Relief: Nutritional Activism from Shanghai to the Southwest, 1937–1945

Fu, Jia-Chen

doi:10.1163/15700615-20121107

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…A national government in its infancy struggled to maintain adequate food supply through imports (Lee, 2010(Lee, , 2011. The violence ravaged agricultural production and supply chains and created masses of refugees dependent on the state or charity for subsistence (Fu, 2012;Lee, 2015). Forced into China's far southwest during the war against Japan, the army found it difficult to prevent malnutrition in its soldiers, even with American help (M. S. Liu, 2019;Wang & Yang, 2019).…”

Section: Food and Health In Modern Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history

Smith

2021

History Compass

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This essay explores the relationships between food and health in Chinese history, from ancient times to the present.It briefly reviews how historians have written about dietary knowledge in China's past, from a midcentury focus on discoveries that prefigured those of modern nutrition science to a more expansive recent understanding of healthy eating.From there, the piece draws on scholarship from the past 2 decades to highlight the complexity of pre-modern Chinese ideas about food and its connection to ritual, social order, moral rectitude, pleasure, and physical and emotional well-being, all of which factored into dietetic prescriptions and prohibitions. Finally, the last section focuses on the modern period. It suggests that while Western foods and nutrition science acquired great prestige in early twentiethcentury China, by the early 21st century both had lost some of their luster, and interest in classical and folk understandings of diet-inflected by the postsocialist political and economic order-was again flourishing.

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Section: Food and Health In Modern Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history

Smith

2021

History Compass

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“…Chia-Yin Huang believed that mental and behavioral problems were closely related to earlier experiences in dysfunctional conventional families and that their solution called for some measure of social reform (Blowers & Wang, 2014;Wang, 2011Wang, , 2016. Fu (2012) has pointed that wartime Shanghai was turned into a laboratory for scientific experiments and research in nutritional sciences. The present study shows that, in a comparable manner, the Shanghai Mental Hygiene Association and its clinical services created an opportunity for different bodies of psychological knowledge to interact with each other but not necessarily in a mutually coordinated and fruitful manner.…”

Section: Intersection Of Interests and Ideasmentioning

confidence: 99%

An international teamwork: Mental hygiene in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.

Wang¹

2019

History of Psychology

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Mental hygiene experienced significant growth on an international level in the first half of the 20th century. A concept of American origin, mental hygiene developed into various forms in different cultural and national contexts. With a large international settlement and vibrant cultural activities, Shanghai witnessed a rise of interest in preventing mental illnesses and promoting mental health during the 1930s and early 1940s. The city gradually became one of the most important places for providing mental hygiene services in China. Apart from the establishment of mental hospitals, departments of neuropsychiatry, and child guidance clinics, people from various disciplines, sectors, and nationalities united to deliver health services to the foreign as well as local Chinese population. The present study first examines the social and cultural conditions that made possible, according to contemporary firsthand accounts, this international “teamwork.” Taking the establishment of The Mercy Hospital for Nervous Diseases and the organization of child guidance clinics as examples, this study investigates the ways in which knowledge and practices of different origins were combined and transformed. In contrast to previous depictions of the development of psychiatry and mental hygiene in Republican China as a product of missionary influence, scientific progress, or social control, this study seeks to illuminate the interplay of international and local forces in negotiating the meaning of mental hygiene and creating a flexible public health model characteristic of Shanghai’s political and social makeup.

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“…They served an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 refugee children between November 1937 and March 1938. Through its nutritional activism, the Refugee Children's Committee redefined soybean milk as a nutritional salve (Fu 2012). High in protein with good vitamin coverage, the soybean represented a homegrown solution to a human crisis of epic proportion.…”

Section: The Milk Bottlementioning

confidence: 99%

The Tyranny of the Bottle: Vitasoy and the Cultural Politics of Packaging

2018

Self Cite

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Introduction In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Hong Kong beverage company Vitasoy (Weitanai 維他奶) launched an advertising campaign for its soybean milk that tapped into an increasingly prominent public sense of longing for the past, particularly the seemingly less anxious golden era of the 1960s and 1970s. 1 Vitasoy's self-conscious adoption of a nostalgic aesthetic in its commercials cast Vitasoy and its soybean milk as emblematic of an earlier innocence. A drink that accompanied one through life's various transitions: childhood innocence to young love to marriage, Vitasoy presented itself as a marker of both individual memories and collective histories, a symbol of trust in a time of uncertainty and dislocation (Chan 2015). The Vitasoy product appeared in each frame, but in two different packaging forms: the small tetra-pak box with a crooked neck straw and the curved, clear soda bottle. These packaging forms are the material 'we see but we don't see' (Cochoy and Grandclément 2005). Within the context of Vitasoy's advertising campaign, the soda bottle and tetra-pak are evocative of different temporal moments (e.g., past and present) and reflective of the company's branding. Beyond these gestures towards reflective nostalgia and Hong Kong identity, the packaging would appear to serve no other function beyond technical utility (i.e., that which holds and transports soybean milk) and marketing (Figure 1). The specificity of the packaging was, it would seem, incidental to "Vitasoy's exploitation of nostalgia and local historicity to reinvent its brand" (Chan 2015: 170). Despite the deliberate allusions to an earlier period in both Vitasoy's and Hong Kong's history, there was a limit to which Vitasoy would draw upon the past. The one packaging form absent from Vitasoy's affective excursion was the milk bottle, the original packaging material for Vitasoy's soybean milk in the 1940s (Figure 2). Indeed, for most Hong Kong consumers and due to the prominence with which Vitasoy has become associated with the classic soda bottle of the 1960s, the fact that Vitasoy was once sold in milk bottles may come as a surprise. So long as packaging is seen, but not seen, Vitasoy's milk Emory University, US

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Scientising Relief: Nutritional Activism from Shanghai to the Southwest, 1937–1945

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history

Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history

An international teamwork: Mental hygiene in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Tyranny of the Bottle: Vitasoy and the Cultural Politics of Packaging

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