This presentation will explore the ignored scientific work of the laboratories of the Chinese Manchurian Plague Prevention Service (MPPS) and ask how this work became globally accepted. Late Qing and early Republican China was known as the home of plague, and as a place without science. How then did Chinese scientists like Wu Lien-teh convince Euro-American scientific and political leaders that (a) measures they had taken were preventing a new global plague pandemic and (b) that Chinese laboratories could produce globally acceptable scientific knowledge?
When plague broke out in Northeast China in 1910, Dr. Wu Lien-teh challenged the newly established scientific understanding of rat fleas as the vector of transmission based on post-mortem examinations and instead proposed that this was a newly identified form of plague, pneumonic, transmitted directly from person-to-person via sputum from infected lungs. When these early hypotheses proved true, Wu was put in charge of the Qing government's plague efforts, hosted China's first international scientific conference, in 1911, and established China's first scientific laboratory in Harbin. This presentation draws from the large corpus of ignored research studies in Chinese and English published by the MPPS and moves beyond the oft-repeated argument that responses to the Manchurian plague epidemic were driven primarily by the desire of China to maintain sovereignty in Manchuria. Rather than putting the science in a black box, unknowable to the historian, this presentation will examine the degree of success of that research in becoming globally accepted scientific knowledge.
