Farewell to the God of Plague by Gross Miriam;

Author:Gross, Miriam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 13. The Party’s medical representative looking after the people like family by helping them with intimate caretaking needs. Photo from the collection of Miriam Gross. Picture taken in the Yujiang County Songwenshen Memorial Museum.

This awareness downgraded the doctors as solo actors and turned them into chess pieces whose caring acts redounded to the Party and Chairman Mao. In one Qingpu family, after seven different family members had been treated for snail fever by 1956, the mother said: “If we didn’t have the CCP, our family wouldn’t exist. Now I completely welcome them as if they were family.”40 As one sixty-year-old woman put it after the campaign treated her family members, “If Chairman Mao is taking care of our bodies’ health in this way, then we should exert ourselves too.”41 While health campaigns did not create a population of loyalists among participants in prevention activities or among the majority who thought themselves healthy, they did generate a group of very dedicated activists among the “saved” who were predisposed to promote the Party’s nonhealth objectives to the wider community.

Peer activists were a vital repository of good will and an important catalyst for socialist construction efforts. Villages where disease was prevalent and that were a major campaign focus sometimes had higher enlistment rates in all Party activities. Cured people were more willing to join early cooperatives, pay taxes, and sell their grain at artificially low prices on the newly nationalized market. While data are anecdotal, the more that treatment was subsidized, the more willingly people supported the Party in nonhealth domains.42 Qingpu’s famous Rentun Village as of 1951 had only 341 residents, but according to a 1965 report, at least one person enlisted in the army every year. In contrast, a village of comparable size with less disease that had neither energetically engaged in health work, nor received treatment from the government, “didn’t have even one person enlist.”43 In 1953, after the government provided free treatment to people in Longhua District, on the periphery of Shanghai, the distrustful relationship between the people and the Party was transformed. Villagers’ compliance in paying grain taxes rose from 20 to 80 percent, and the whole area fulfilled its tax responsibilities. Even more surprisingly, villagers changed their position regarding the nationalized grain market. As they put it: “When the government shows loving concern for us peasants’ health and treats our diseases, we all support the government state purchasing and marketing monopoly policies. We guarantee we will not sell the grain to private smugglers.”44

While unlikely to be true across the board, villagers benefitting from the snail fever campaign felt in debt to the Party and were therefore more open to potentially detrimental activities. By 1955, the nationalized grain market was an accepted fact, but it was variably used. Yet, after the campaign came to Jiangsu’s Jiangdu County, people “actively sold off surplus grain . . . to greatly thank the Party and government.”45 The campaign also encouraged people to believe in the government enough to try early forms of cooperatives.

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