Research Projects

As part of the Wellcome Trust funded project Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health After World War II, this research examines how socialism, with its diverse interpretations and applications, has shaped the early practices of Primary Health Care in China, India and Tanzania, which ultimately influenced the global health agenda setting. The origins of primary health care are often traced to the social medicine experiments in the early 20th century and socialist medicine in the Soviet Union and China. However, the narratives often incorporate a deeply ingrained belief that the theory of social and socialist medicine mostly originated from the Global North, and the roles played by the Global South in global health agenda-setting have often been assessed through a “foreign gaze”. To rectify the missing pieces and readdress the biases and misconceptions of previous narratives, this project examines the socialist medicine and social medicine roots of PHC in Asia and Africa. Departing from the narrative of how the ideas from the developed North influenced the less developed South, this project takes China, India, and Tanzania as sites for different ideas to display, debate, and develop under their certain social, political, economic, historical, and cultural contexts.
1 October 2021-30 September 2025
Wellcome Trust

The project examines the legal, epidemiological, and institutional challenges in the complex process of the global smallpox eradication programme (SEP) in the case of China, which was not a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) when the programme was delivered. It is unfolded in three levels. On the global level, it investigates the impact of Cold War politics on the policy of the WHO, as well as the engagement between the WHO Headquarters, WHO Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO), and various member states regarding China’s membership in the organization and its impact on the SEP. On the international level, it examines the knowledge exchange and technical collaboration between China and various groups of experts shifted from time in the 20th Century, how these different visions of medicine and public health were adapted or resisted in the local contexts of China, and how it empowered the country to eradicate smallpox independently. On the national level, it studies how the changing political landscape shaped the international health collaboration activities and public health policies in the communist China from 1949 to 1980, and how smallpox eradication was conceived, planned, delivered, achieved in the country, and eventually certified by the WHO in a wider social and political context.
25 September 2017-25 September 2021
Wellcome Trust