Heat, cold and climatic determinism in China’s urban epidemics

Abstract

‘Thermal governance’ has been discussed elsewhere as the regulation of temperature through infrastructure, technology and social and political organisation. We extend it here to include a subtle and heretofore under-recognised element of public health: the governance of recent urban epidemics by the Chinese state. The SARS epidemic of 2002–2003 in Guangzhou and more markedly the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan triggered massive emergency responses by public health authorities which differed from previous strategies in more fully activating the state health sector known in China as Chinese Medicine ( zhongyi) and outside China as Traditional Chinese Medicine. With this enlistment comes a body of theory and practice which makes meteorology central to diagnostic and prescriptive processes, and reinforces as part of state discourse the long-standing Chinese cultural understanding of ‘heat’ as an internal micro-climatic element transcending temperature.