Saving Lives in Wartime China: How Medical Reformers Built Modern Healthcare Systems amid War and Epidemics, 1928–1945, by John R. Watt. Leiden: Brill, 2014. xxii+339 pp. €135.00/US$175.00 (cloth). Although several fine histories of modern East Asia recently have been written, none of them integrated public health as a narrative thread, much less a central theme. Reading John Watt’s Saving Lives in Wartime China reaffirms to me that public health is one of the central themes of twentieth-century East Asia. This ne- glect of public health and medical transformations in survey narratives of the pe- riod is arguably more because of their authors’ professional training in other di- mensions of history than the actual significance of such transformations in modern East Asian history. This absence is gradually being remedied with the new schol- arship of the past decade that integrates public health and medical reforms into twentieth-century Chinese and East Asian history. 1 Related to the political and military history of the first half of twentieth-century China, in this new book Watt argues that the Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) took radically different approaches to saving the lives of their soldiers and the peasants that had dramatically different consequences. Whereas the KMT did not provide adequately either for the nutrition or the health care of its conscript armies nor did it hold back from short-term military decisions that resulted in killing millions of Chinese civilians, the CCP’s policy to protect the lives of its soldiers as well as peasants who joined them proved decisive in the 1. For example, books by Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty- Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Ka-che Yip, Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Michael Shiyung Liu, Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-Ruled Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: AAS, 2009); Charlotte Furth and Angela Ki Che Leung, eds., Health and Hygiene in Chi- nese East Asia: Policies and Public in the Long Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Tina Phillips Johnson, Childbirth in Republican China: Delivering Modernity (1911–1949) (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011); Alexander Bay, Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease (Roch- ester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012); Liping Bu, Darwin Stapleton, and Ka-che Yip, eds., Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia (London: Routledge, 2012); John DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health and Nation-Building in South Korea since 1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Bridie Andrews, Making Modern Medicine in China, 1860–1960 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014); Bridie Andrews and Mary Brown Bullock, eds., Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: When Chinese Medicine Encountered the State, 1910–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Liping Bu and Ka-che Yip, eds., Public Health and National Reconstruction in Post-war Asia: Inter- national Influences, Local Transformations (London: Routledge, 2012); Ka-che Yip and Yuen Sang Leung, eds., Health Policy and Disease in Colonial and Post-colonial Hong Kong, 1841–2003, Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia (London: Routledge, 2016); Robert Peckham, Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Miriam Gross, Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Liping Bu, Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2011); Brett Walker, The Toxic Archi- pelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 150 • THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 77 This content downloaded from 128.220.008.015 on March 27, 2017 19:36:04 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).