CURRENT RESEARCH

Nation, Medicine and Mind: Mental Hygiene Promotion in Republican Shanghai

Supervisors: Professor Mathew Thomson and Professor Anne Gerritsen.

First Year Supervisor: Howard Chiang

This thesis focuses on the encounter of ‘Western’ knowledge of psychiatry and psychology with Chinese culture and its locality in Republican Shanghai, the Chinese medical center of its day. With an expectation of eliminating traditional backwardness and cultivating modern citizens, intellectuals began to explore ways of building a stronger nation, reflected in strong bodies and minds. Thus, knowledge and practices about psychiatry, psychology, and mental hygiene were introduced, debated, tested and propagated in the literate circle as well as by the masses. A wide range of participants (like educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, publishers, or governmental officers) were involved in corresponding activities like institutionalizing patients, educational reform and the Mental Hygiene Movements. These tumultuous activities had been intertwined with cultural revolution, nationalism as well as warfare.

The care of mental health recorded the history of knowledge transmission approaches employed by intellectuals who sought out new knowledge, 'scientific' and ‘unscientific‘, to cope with cultural conflicts and foreign critics while drawing support from the big mass. In spite of China's disadvantageous status in a semi-colonial context and initiatives of Chinese intellectuals, knowledge transmission was not simply unilateral and not to be taken for granted. On the contrary, selectivity, conflicts, compromise and integration failure was encountered often or more. Traditional cognition and philosophy were criticized and actually targeted by those trends, but exerted underlying influences when 'Western' knowledge was transmitted to the masses.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Sino-foreign Relations (History of Modern China, Pacific Rim, and China-Inner Asia)
• Transcultural Knowledge Transmission and Locality
• History of Medicine and Technology (Psychiatry, Anti-psychiatry, Psychology, Mental Health, other Therapies and Philosophy related to Mental Health Care)
• Public Health (Kinship, Culture and Mental Health), Medicine and Health Exhibition in the Public Sphere

ACADEMIC PROFILE

• Ph.D., History of Medicine, Warwick University, UK, 2015-2019

Funded by: Warwick-CSC Joint Scholarship, 2015-2018

• M.A., Geographical History, Xiamen University, China, 2014

Thesis: Native Contributions to the Royalty: The Tributary System and Local Control in Ming China

• B.A., History, Xiamen University, China, 2011.

Thesis: Non-core Area: The Topographical Advantages of Henan in the Ming Dynasty

CONFERENCE CONTRIBUTIONS

• Asia Economic History Seminar Series at the LSE Economic History Department, 31 March 2020.
• ESHS First Young Scholars Conference: Transcultural Knowledge, Paris, 10-12 September 2019 (The Young Scholars Network of the European Society for the History of Science)

• 14th Forum: Literature and Science History, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 5 July 2019.

• Healthcare in China: A medical-humanities perspective, University of Oxford, 14 June 2019.
• History and Philosophy of Science Winter School: History of Psychiatry, Past Trends, Future Directions, University of Sydney, 13-17 August 2018.
• Health Histories: The Next Generation, Shanghai, 12-13 October 2017.
• China and the Human Sciences: 1600 to the Present, Italy, 10-12 July 2016.
• International Summer School: “Connectivity and Change: Regimes, Conflicts and Revolutions in Global Perspectives”, Belgium, 30 June - 2 July 2016.

TEACHING

• Seminar Tutor, First-Year Core Module, The Making of the Modern World, Department of History, University of Warwick, 2019-2020.
• Teaching Assistant, Bibliography Research in History of Ancient China, Xiamen University, 2011-2012.

FUNDS

• Grants for Participation：New Perspectives in Chinese history: The Use of Archives from the Middle and Lower Course of the Yangzi River and Related Regions (16th c.-1949), co-organized by L’École française d’Extrême-OrientLink opens in a new window, the Max Weber StiftungLink opens in a new window and the École des hautes études en Sciences sociales, Centre d’études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaineLink opens in a new window, Paris,16 to 18 October 2019.
• Grants for Participation: Asia and Europe. Discourse, Circulation and Representation, organized by the Doctoral Program Asia & Europe, 09.30-10.04, 2019, University of Zurich.
• Department of History PG Research Funding, 2016-2019.
• CHM Research Bursary, 2016-2019.

OTHER ENGAGEMENTS

• China Talk: Culture without Border, China Development Society, University of Warwick, 31 October 2019. CDS Talk  CDS PPT
• Hosting Reading Lunch of Center of the History of Medicine, Warwick University, 2016-2017.