New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2012. xiii, 202 pp. (Maps, B&W photos., illus.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-18318-1.
Summers’ monograph on the 1910 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria that killed 60,000 is a welcome addition to studies of the Chinese northeast. The monograph’s goal is to record the regional and colonial geopolitics of a Manchurian epidemic in a region whose political identity and natural resources were claimed by China, Russia and Japan. Summers’ work demonstrates how epidemiology, as both a study of plague and a means to contain it, was used by all three powers to strengthen their claims to Manchuria. The monograph is a contribution to the growing historiography on the interaction between modern medicine and colonialism. The short monograph (153 pages of text) introduces Manchuria’s complex political, economic and colonial identity in chapters 1 and 2. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the progress of the plague across Manchuria and the 1911 International Plague Conference that met in Shenyang (Mukden) under Chinese sponsorship. The final two chapters outline the plague’s origins and its intersection with Manchuria’s complex early twentieth-century political landscape. Summers argues that the plague’s outbreak and the subsequent jockeying among Russian, Chinese, Japanese, American and British diplomats, administrators and doctors was due to Manchuria’s new-found place in the global transportation and fur trade. China’s political weakness, according to Summers, coupled with Russian and Japanese colonial aspirations, shaped the plague’s management. Summers illustrates this strategy in three cities—Harbin, Shenyang (Mukden) and Dalian—using them as stand-ins for Manchuria’s aforementioned three competing powers. Ultimately the plague’s outbreak, containment and transformation into formal administrative bodies of management (international conference, medical schools, and government supervision) served the three powers’ competing colonialisms.
The monograph’s strongest sections are those on the plague’s origins and ecology, as well as its intersection with the global fur trade, since it was said the plague originated in the fur trade of the Mongolian marmot. Summers also does a fine job examining how Russian and Japanese colonial strategies, such as the use of medicine and modern medical administration, justified their political claims, as well as obstructing the claims of others to Manchuria. Summers argues correctly that the plague, its outbreak, management and institutionalization cannot be understood separately from claims each power was making in Manchuria.
The monograph’s shortcomings are perhaps because this very complex situation is examined in few pages. The source base is all English; Japanese, Russian and Chinese sources are in translation or credited to other sources. For example, the work of Russo-German Dr. Roger Budberg-Boenninghausen, Harbin’s only doctor who spoke Russian and Chinese, is only briefly noted. I would direct readers towards Marc Gamsa’s article “The Epidemic of Pneumonic Plague in Manchuria 1910–1911” (Past and Present no. 190, Feb. 2006: 147–183) for Budberg-Boenninghausen’s contribution to plague’s management, as well as a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of plague management between Russian and Chinese territory, through the adjoining cities of Harbin and Fujiadian.
Readers of Summers’ work may also come away with two erroneous conclusions. The first is the plague’s origin with the Mongolian marmot, for which there is no proof. The monograph’s extensive coverage of the marmot trade, and the global fur trade as a “plague reservoir,” is fascinating and does contribute to the debate on Manchuria’s incorporation into a global economy. Summers could also draw on the growing literature of Russian and Japanese scientific observation of Manchuria’s wildlife as part of a bigger project to justify their tenuous claims to Manchurian territory. This Russian and Japanese work produced the incorrect conclusion of marmot-to-human transmission, a conclusion that was one lap in a race between competing colonial powers to claim the plague’s origin. Summers’ discussion of the plague reservoir needs to be placed into the context of these competing claims.
The second fuzzy conclusion concerns the nature of claims, political and otherwise, to Manchurian territory. Perhaps because Summers uses Russian and Japanese sources in translation, he takes their claims at face value. These sources sought to justify and extend the privileges of what were essentially economic concessions, the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchurian Railway, through claims of modern administration, city governments, education and health care. For example, Summer’s discussion of plague management in Manchuria’s three biggest cities of Harbin, Shenyang and Dalian—Russian, Chinese and Japanese controlled, respectively—praises Harbin and Dalian’s management but has little good to say for Shenyang as the older and presumably less well-administered city. He gives no proof beyond straight roads and more coercive Russian and Japanese plague management, and does not explore the impact of management on the population. A photo on page 60 of a Russian doctor examining a man identified as Chinese who has been tagged ignores that the man was tagged like an animal, measures that did not apply to the Russian population. The power relationship between the Japanese, Russians and Chinese, so clear in Summers’ account of the competition over who would mount the 1911 international conference, is absent from the description of plague containment. These measures, such as quarantining, at gunpoint, Harbin’s Chinese population on Chinese territory, and the destruction of Chinese property, were measures not uncontested by Russians and Chinese, and perhaps partly an explanation of why Chinese authorities were unwilling to harshly enforce quarantine. See Ruth Rogaski’s “Vampires in Plagueland: The multiple meanings of weisheng in Manchuria” (Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia, Duke University Press, 2010) for more insights into Chinese perceptions of Russian and Japanese colonial medicine.
Qing China, since the late nineteenth century, modernized Manchuria’s administration, incorporated it as three provinces, and sponsored Chinese settlement and economic development. China was not a helpless bystander to either Russian or Japanese colonial projects (Summers uses both colonial and post-colonial without defining them). Summers’ work unwittingly reproduces the troupe of Chinese tradition and Japanese and Russian modernity. China, like Japan and Russia, was colonizing a frontier but politically it was their frontier and the Chinese state was very much in the game. Summers’ work is certainly the best introduction to this event but should not be taken as the final word.
Blaine Chiasson
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
pp. 592-595